Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

All Quotes by author - Rick Tumlinson

" 2012 will be seen as the beginning of the frontier era in space. "

" After he retired, Dad worked at my uncle's boat company, a camp for kids, and eventually became County Commissioner for a term. He is known around town, works at the Food Pantry my mother helped start, and is a very serious member of Kiwanis. "

" All the best to SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and, yes, the Progress teams, who are all working on their own solutions to open the frontier along with Boeing and the rest of the fliers trying to fly, all of whom I know personally share the dream. This isn't their fault; they just want to make things fly. "

" As far as I am concerned, the whiners of Wall Street and the political pundits, power players, and the swarms of sycophantic, sound-bite-spewing sewage rats that surround them can stuff it. They are the wrong stuff, and their self-glorification is an obscenity. No matter what they say of themselves, they are not that important. "

" As we have seen in our own history, the injection of new ideas from other worlds transformed life for all, and with the establishment of new frontier communities far from the reach of the old world, new social systems also formed, more in tune with the fact that it was the individual who had to make the decisions and do the work of pioneering. "

" By opening space, for the first time in our history, rather than inexorably extracting the blood of life from this oh-so-precious sphere in our quest for wealth, we will turn outwards and upwards, creating new wealth from places already dead, advancing into places where there is no life, and bringing its seeds with us. "

" By reigniting the exploration role of our government Lewises and Clarks within and enabled by the infrastructure and economic drive of commercial space and the people themselves, this nation can rise to heights unimaginable. "

" China, Russia and India are shooting for the Moon. United Arab Emirates says Mars. Other private citizens and companies are heading either to Mars, asteroids, or the Moon. "

" Congress often covers the exposed crotch of our human spaceflight program with the figleaf of science when it's an obvious lie to justify the pumping of billions of dollars into the belly of an ever-voracious aerospace industrial complex. And yes, of course space is dangerous. "

" Crazy may not be the one who says the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth is round, and someday people might fly. It may be those who laugh at such words whose minds are lost. "

" Each time these pioneers expanded into new realms, they discovered the old ways wouldn't work. Whenever a new domain was inhabited by humans, old survival patterns were left behind and new patterns created. "

" From John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, presidents have rhetorically opened the door to the frontier for us, and each time, we have turned away to fight over destinations, technologies, and timing. "

" From the moment those images of Buzz and Neil arrived on the world's television sets, our human space program has been lost - for a blatantly simple and obvious reason - after the first giant leap to take that first small step, there was no plan for the next one, because there was no second question to be answered. "

" Go out tonight and look at the stars. And allow yourself to dream. "

" Government paved the on-ramp to space. Now, the vehicles taking us up to the space highway are being built by citizens, leveraging off government-catalyzed technologies and needs. "

" Government should support - and benefits from - economic development and settlement. The oft-used analogy of building highways and supporting infrastructure - not driving the vehicles or the industry - fits. "

" Governments spending billions on a humans-to-Mars program won't allow wild-eyed billionaires to steal the glory; all heck will break loose as the public and sidelined governments decry and block the perceived cosmic land grab. Yet the private folks aren't waiting. "

" Homo Sapiens is a frontier creature. It is what we do; it defines what we are. This has been true from our very beginnings. It is the core reason our progenitors wandered forth from the first primordial valleys in search of more room, better hunting, or more fertile soil. "

" I am a Leaper: a person who - thanks to some mathematical errors tied to the cosmic interactions of Earth and Sun and bad math on the part of some old timers long ago - is lost in time, born on a day that simply doesn't exist three out of four years. "

" I am a spacer. It is what and who I am. It is my cause and my life. I am not an enthusiast, a fan, or supporter. It is what I exist to do here on Earth. And there are many of us; some, like Elon Musk, are very high profile. "

" I do not expect NASA to go out and build settlements and colonies. I do not expect them to give SpaceX all the money needed to colonize Mars. I do not expect them to realize the future of humanity is contingent on harvesting the wealth of the solar system overnight and suddenly subsidize my asteroid mining project. "

" If governments decide to return to the Moon - as seems to be the case - it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community. "

" I guess it's human nature, as every group breaks into factions, yet at a time when we are trying to be taken seriously, it can confuse people - especially when it moves from being about where you want to go and what you want to do to why the others are idiots. "

" It is in the failures of our striving that we find ourselves, and it is then, in the rising above them and trying again, that we carry ourselves to the next level. If the runner stumbles, they get up and run again. "

" It is time to declare that the goal of the United States in space is the settlement of the solar system, from low Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars. "

" It is time to kickstart a new U.S. space transportation industry and time to spread that industry into space itself, leveraging our space station legacy to ignite imaginations and entrepreneurship so that we can move farther out, back to the Moon, out to the asteroids, and on to Mars. "

" It is time to take a stand for the future. Not in just words but actions. It is time to step up and demand the Vision. For by its realization, we all will win, and I mean us all. "

" It was Apollo 8 that first showed us the tiny blue marble of Earth floating in the void of space, one of the great psychological shifts in human history. From out there, we can both appreciate and begin to solve the problems of our world in ways unavailable to us otherwise. "

" It was the summer of 1968 or so, and Dad and my little brother were out camping. While up in the mountains, my brother was bitten by a rattlesnake. As they raced back to the base, my dad sucked out the venom and used his hands as a tourniquet and probably save his life, for it was a serious bite, and he was just a little kid. "

" I've been doing a few interviews since the loss of the SpaceX Dragon on its way to the Space Station. Each one very quickly questions the viability of what they call commercial space in light of the failure. I tell them space is hard: this is what happens early in a program with new technology. "

Check our other websites: