Spacecraft Quotes

“There is an object blocking my view of the Petrova line. It’s right next to my ship. Maybe a few hundred meters away. It’s roughly triangle-shaped and it has gable-like protrusions along its hull.

Yes. I said hull. It's not an asteroid- the lines are too smooth; too straight. This object was made. Fabricated. Constructed. Shapes like that don't occur in nature.

It's a ship.

Another ship.

There's another ship in this system with me. Those flashes of light- those were its engines. It's Astrophage-powered. Just like the Hail Mary. But the design, the shape- it's nothing like any spacecraft I've ever seen. The whole thing is made of huge, flat surfaces- the worst possible way to make a pressure vessel. No one in their right mind would make a ship that shape.

No one on Earth would, anyway.

I blink a few times at what I'm seeing. I gulp.

This... this is an alien spacecraft. Made by aliens. Aliens intelligent enough to make a spacecraft.

Humanity isn't alone in the universe. And I've just met our neighbours.

'Holy fucking shit!”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“The fastest that human spacecraft are likely to achieve in the twenty-first century, I think, is 300 kilometres per second.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Her belly was beginning to complain with hunger, and she had to imagine that the others were feeling the same. They were holding the bridge of the largest spacecraft humanity had ever built, trapped in the starless dark by an alien power they barely began to comprehend, but they were still constrained by the petty needs of flesh, and their collective blood sugar was getting pretty low.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“With the geosynchronous orbit, the RAE Table maxes out. It has two answers for the orbital lifetime of a spacecraft in GSO: "greater than a million years" and "indefinite.”
― Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures

“The Eagle Has Landed

The airlock swings open -
Behold! A new world:
obsidian black sky
lit by the sun's
fierce glare.
Inch
Down the ladder -
The first man on the moon!*
Look!
The first footprint.
Listen!
The first word
splitting the still dead silence.
Dead dust
dead rock
dead black sky
A dead dead world.
Zombie in a moontrance I*
trip
stumble
fall
rise
before the slow dust settles.

Adrian Rumble”
― John Foster

“When it comes to travelling to Mars, we either pursue physical paths and redesign our spacecraft with improved radiation-shielding and staggering fuel-efficiency. Or we cheat a little and bend the space/time continuum to get there.”
― Stewart Stafford