I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.

Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.

I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side.

My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars – this is very important – so you don’t have to carry the return fuel when you go there.

I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.

The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It’s an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn’t sustainable.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

Perhaps one day I will go into space.

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.

I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

We’re working on New Glenn, which is our orbital vehicle, but we have in our mind’s eye an even bigger vehicle called New Armstrong.

I don’t think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.

Space has always fascinated me. As a young boy looking up at the stars, I found it impossible to resist thinking what was out there and if I ever would experience space first-hand.

It’s time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth. Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.

Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

Two kids in their dorm room can’t start anything important in space today. That’s why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space, to build that transportation network.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.

It’s a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It’s an interesting place to be. I recommend it.

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we’re ever likely to do that is by going into space.

I have won this lottery. It’s a gigantic lottery, and it’s called Amazon.com. And I’m using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space.

It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.

You look like a talent scout for a cemetery.

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

I read ‚The High Frontier‘ in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.

In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

Why should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure?

The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that it basically just says, ‚Look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let’s do it close to each other.‘ That way… you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, ‚I’m out of eggs. What have you got?‘

I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves.

SpaceX has the potential of saving the U.S. government $1 billion a year. We are opposed to creating an entrenched monopoly with no realistic means for anyone to compete.

I’m trying to get to Mars before everyone else.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.

I know Elon, we’re very like minded in many ways. We’re not conceptual twins. One thing I want us to do is go to Mars, but for me it’s one thing. He’s singularly focused on that. I think motivation wise, for me I don’t find that Plan B idea motivating. I don’t want a plan B for Earth, I want Plan B to make sure Plan A works.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

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.

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.

I think we have a good chance of surviving long enough to colonize the solar system.

If I ever had twins, I’d use one for parts.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.

In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.

You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on… So it’s a fixer-upper of a planet.

Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

I have wanted to fly into space for many years, but never imagined it would really be feasible.

We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.

I’d call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.

If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me. I’d have killed myself.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.