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" We go as humans into space to expand the domain of humanity and life - not robots. And as we do, we will get more science because when you are living somewhere, you obviously learn more about it. NASA and the government must first get out of the way and then support us as we open the frontier. "

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" The opening of the Frontier is not an engineering problem. It is not a money problem. It is a challenge to our ability to decide to make it happen and to think and act the right way to get the results we want, we need, we demand. "

Rick Tumlinson

Challenge

Money

Need

" We have a space agency desperately in need of purpose, whose employees and capabilities have been wasted for decades on make-work projects and dead-end PowerPoint pioneering placebos designed to do nothing more than keep the billing high. "

" NewSpace companies are staffed by young, new leaders who worship the giants who got us here, such as the recently passed Neil Armstrong, and are eager to work with NASA to do great things together - but we have to both give them a chance and get out of the way. "

" 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. "

" Robotics, manufacturing, medicine, farming, energy - all will be pushed to and beyond their limits and, by so doing, will advance at speeds far faster than without the impetus and challenge of opening a frontier - thus also raising the odds of survival in our favor. "

" NewSpace, commercial space - whatever you want to call it - is rising, with or without government support. It is rising in West Texas and on the Gulf Coast, in California and on the Virginia coast, and rising from the ashes of the old space program in Florida and in small shops and university labs in a hundred places in between. "

" This is what the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) represents. Experimental, explorational science. Learning about Mars as a new world. Discovering new things that will tell us about the history of our solar system, help reveal the secrets of life, and continue blazing the trail that may someday be traveled by the rest of us. "

" 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. "

" Space is big. The whole point of the frontier is that we go there to do new things in new places - not one place, and not one thing, but all of the above. "

" 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. "

" To establish human settlements on the Moon, Mars, or in the free-space between, humans will have to again rapidly adapt. Like early pioneers, there will be no nearby friendly merchants or supportive governments to replace that broken tool. "

" Whether your father, husband, son, or brother has been on the front lines, driving a computer or programming a tank, wielding a gun or a wrench, they are a team. No one moves, no one wins without everyone doing their job. "

" 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. "

" Our society's youth will grow up knowing that tomorrow can be better, that there are alternatives for the future, that there are living, breathing humans of all colors and creeds out there in the sky building new worlds. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Your birthday happens each year on exactly the same day. It is a solid thing, a dependable thing, a measure of your life broken down into 365 subunits. For a Leaper, it is a bit different. For us, the basic assumption is shattered from the beginning. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Trust in our economic system and the genius and hard work of our citizens beyond the mandate and control of government. "

" The opening of space to human development and settlement is the most important activity of the human species. From hope to health, from wonder to wealth, the environment, and the very act of living, space is the future. "

" I would just ask you for one moment to imagine what today would be like if we had built on that landing by creating a permanent and growing community there and moved on to Mars. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There are moments in time when the coincidence of art and reality interact to allow us a glimpse into the context of history. The release of the Christopher Nolan film 'Interstellar' a few days after two catastrophes in our space endeavor gives us one of those moments. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Rick Tumlinson

Off

" 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. "

" When President Kennedy set us on a path to the Moon in the 1960s, he knew exactly why - to produce a photo-op that would clearly show America would be the winner in the decades-long battle of political systems called the Cold War. "

" The exploration of space: Be it by humans or robots, based on the best choice for the mission and the most efficient means to return the data and science sought. Most of the time, this will mean we send robots due to cost and danger. But sometimes, we will need the irreplaceable judgment and descriptive abilities of a person on the spot. "