Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go -- and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
Until they come to see us from their planet, I wait patiently. I hear them saying: Don't call us, we'll call you.
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
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.
Space is the stature of God.
Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings and while with silent lifting mind I've trod the high, untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand and touched the face of God.
No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.
The sky is no longer the limit.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
God has no intention of setting a limit to the efforts of man to conquer space.
— Pius XII
Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.
The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth.
It's only during an eclipse that the Man in the Moon has a place in the sun.
It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars, and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead.
It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.