The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel.
I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there’ll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.
It’s just mind-blowingly awesome. I apologize, and I wish I was more articulate, but it’s hard to be articulate when your mind’s blown-but in a very good way.
To our knowledge, life exists on only one planet, Earth. If something bad happens, it’s gone. I think we should establish life on another planet – Mars in particular – but we ’re not making very good progress. SpaceX is intended to make that happen.
It’s really incumbent upon us as life’s agents to extend life to another planet. I think that being a multi-planet species will significantly increase the richness and scope of the human experience.
I realized that a methane-oxygen rocket engine could achieve a specific impulse greater than 380.
You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.
If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.
The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.
America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.
Don’t be afraid to reach for the stars.
Our future lies with today’s kids and tomorrow’s space exploration.
The stars don’t look bigger, but they do look brighter.
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Let’s work the problem, people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing.
When we look out into space, we are looking into our own origins, because we are truly children of the stars.
Ad astra per aspera. Translated: “to the stars through difficulties”.
Classifying the stars has helped materially in all studies of the structure of the universe.
If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.