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.

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

Just as the system of the sun, planets and comets is put in motion by the forces of gravity, and its parts persist in their motions, so the smaller systems of bodies also seem to be set in motion by other forces and their particles to be variously moved in relation to each other and, especially, by the electric force.

We’ve gotta reinvest in space travel. We should’ve never left the moon.

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

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.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

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

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don’t want to open up my cornflakes and find that they’re full of pebbles… You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn’t.

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.

When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people – for a long time, anyway – are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.

I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, ‚You know, there’s no sound in outer space.‘

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

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

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It’s sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.

Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.

We fly to 106 kilometers. We’ve always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn’t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you’re an astronaut or not.

If you look at ‚Blade Runner,‘ it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday, and there are all kinds of different versions of it.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‚Doctor Who.‘ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it’s this world or nothing. That’s a very powerful perception.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.

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.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, ‚The Martian Chronicles.‘

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.

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 don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

The moon and other celestial bodies should be free for exploration and use by all countries. No country should be permitted to advance a claim of sovereignty.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

We need to know what the resources of the moon are. We have great evidence now because of different kinds of radar and spectroscopic analysis that people have been able to do. But we really do need to go visit there, and we can do that with a robot craft without any problem.

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.

Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.

It is true that SpaceX is partially a government contractor, but it would be unfair to say that SpaceX is entirely a government contractor.