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.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.

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.

Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.

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

People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it’s cool.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’re taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.

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

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

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

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.

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.

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

The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.

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.

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

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

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 boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I’ll probably always be interested in this planet – it’s my favorite.

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.

We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own.

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.

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.

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

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.

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

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

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.