Space Travel Quotes

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Problem is (follow me closely here, the science is pretty complicated), if I cut a hole in the Hab, the air won't stay inside anymore.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

[Address at Rice University, September 12 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“Knock-knock-knock
No, that's not creepy at all. Being in a spaceship twelve light-years from home and having someone knock on the door is totally normal.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
― John F. Kennedy

“He was on the lookout, and if the chance presented itself, he was going to be off on a little detour of his own during his cruise back to Earth.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“I felt it as a G-force that building pressure that starts in your chest and spreads outward, reminding you that you have mass and the universe has more.”
― Steven Decker, MOTE: SCIFI ADVENTURE SERIES

“A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Sci-Fi, Space-Travel, Space-Opera, Chance-Encounters, Adventure-Reads, Speculative-Fiction, Book-Quotes”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.

To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“Beyond the corridor of our space-time there are infinite numbers of universes, each of them is governed by its own set of laws and physics.”
― Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step

“It was such a change to burst out of the twilight zone suddenly into the panoply of stars and planets.
”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“The ship had made the jump into hyperspace, so there were no stars or worlds to be seen, just a vortex of light and shade they were passing through.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“Humans spent thousands of years looking up at the stars and wondering what was out there. You guys never saw stars at all but you still worked space travel. What an amazing people you Eridians must be. Scientific geniuses.'

The knot in the tape comes loose, recoils wildly, and smacks Rocky's hand. He shakes the affected hand in pain for a moment, then continues messing with the tape measure.

'Yeah, you're definitely a scientist.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“Imagine you are Siri Keeton:

You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.

You'd scream if you had the breath.

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Out here, the connected stars are far enough apart that between bursts, there’s time to think, time to sleep, and time to write.”
― Steven Decker, MOTE: SCIFI ADVENTURE SERIES

“Maybe they had not asked for too much. Maybe they would get everything they wanted.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed.

Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have.”
― George Alec Effinger, Live! from Planet Earth

“Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.

Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Joan knew then that Donna was not an idiot. And the Beatles were not nonsense. And that there had always been a place for her in this world. She had just been walking past it over and over again, never noticing that there was an unmarked door, waiting for her to discover it.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?”
― Ray Bradbury, Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

“As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that's not accurate. People object. They object a lot.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“Reach for the stars all you want, but anchor your soul in the soil.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Burn bright before you burn out!”
― K. A. Phillips

“The ship doesn't travel through space. It bends space around it. The ship becomes a ghost. It creates its own bubble of reality.”
― Eduardo Kim, Artifact 115: Sancus Initiative - Book 1

“Why don't they send moles
and turtles to the moon?

Couldn't the animals that engineer
hollows and tunnels

take charge of
these distant inspections?”
― Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions

“In an email to Allan McDonald in 2014, Mulloy wrote that he had provided the Rogers Commission with video evidence that proved his case, and afterward Executive Director Alton Keel had telephoned him to apologize for the way he had been treated — but by that time the commission’s final report had been published; it was too late to alter the record. In one of his final messages to McDonald, Larry Mulloy signed off,

“Sleep well, Al. I do.”

Almost a decade later, Keel remained adamant that no such call or conversation had ever taken place. Mulloy went straight to Hell in October 2020, aged eighty-six.”
― Adam Higginbotham, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space