Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Rick Tumlinson - Page 2

We need to open the frontier between the Earth and Moon to large-scale human activities, we need to establish human outposts and communities off the Earth and begin the job of doing so right away - and do so largely based on letting the people take over most of the jobs.

Vets are different than other people. Frontline or support, they carry themselves differently than the rest of us. It is as if they entered the service as one person and came out another, and that is the person who they are the rest of their lives.

This is what the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) represents. Experimental, explorational science. Learning about Mars as a new world. Discovering new things that will tell us about the history of our solar system, help reveal the secrets of life, and continue blazing the trail that may someday be traveled by the rest of us.

Each time these pioneers expanded into new realms, they discovered the old ways wouldn't work. Whenever a new domain was inhabited by humans, old survival patterns were left behind and new patterns created.

Space is a canvas, as large and blank as any ever created, for it is indeed creation itself, and it calls to us to paint upon it with our own dreams and imaginations anything we wish, anything we want, and anything we can imagine.

Our society's youth will grow up knowing that tomorrow can be better, that there are alternatives for the future, that there are living, breathing humans of all colors and creeds out there in the sky building new worlds.

We need Big Ideas, as we are in a time of small people, and as Kennedy showed with Apollo, doing something grand in space is the biggest. At a time of huge national doubt and fear of losing our leadership as a nation to others, it focused us, gave us something positive and inspired a generation.

Homo Sapiens is a frontier creature. It is what we do; it defines what we are. This has been true from our very beginnings. It is the core reason our progenitors wandered forth from the first primordial valleys in search of more room, better hunting, or more fertile soil.

We have an industrial base - one that, if made to take orders rather than being allowed in the vacuum of leadership to create them, if enabled by the elimination of cost-plus contracting to produce and achieve rather than waste and receive, could make something worth the cost rather than making work that costs us our dreams.

We have a space agency desperately in need of purpose, whose employees and capabilities have been wasted for decades on make-work projects and dead-end PowerPoint pioneering placebos designed to do nothing more than keep the billing high.

By opening space, for the first time in our history, rather than inexorably extracting the blood of life from this oh-so-precious sphere in our quest for wealth, we will turn outwards and upwards, creating new wealth from places already dead, advancing into places where there is no life, and bringing its seeds with us.

I would just ask you for one moment to imagine what today would be like if we had built on that landing by creating a permanent and growing community there and moved on to Mars.

Space is a laboratory, an experiment in all forms of all things, an infinity of possibilities, properties, and places that cry out for investigation and exploration.

As we have seen in our own history, the injection of new ideas from other worlds transformed life for all, and with the establishment of new frontier communities far from the reach of the old world, new social systems also formed, more in tune with the fact that it was the individual who had to make the decisions and do the work of pioneering.

The Apollo generation wasn't a historical fluke. It was the predictable result of what happens when a free nation actually decides on something and goes for it. We can do it again, do it better, and do it for keeps this time. But we must decide: Will America, as a nation, support the settlement of space?

After he retired, Dad worked at my uncle's boat company, a camp for kids, and eventually became County Commissioner for a term. He is known around town, works at the Food Pantry my mother helped start, and is a very serious member of Kiwanis.

It is time to declare that the goal of the United States in space is the settlement of the solar system, from low Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars.

By reigniting the exploration role of our government Lewises and Clarks within and enabled by the infrastructure and economic drive of commercial space and the people themselves, this nation can rise to heights unimaginable.

Go out tonight and look at the stars. And allow yourself to dream.

Crazy may not be the one who says the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth is round, and someday people might fly. It may be those who laugh at such words whose minds are lost.

Whether your father, husband, son, or brother has been on the front lines, driving a computer or programming a tank, wielding a gun or a wrench, they are a team. No one moves, no one wins without everyone doing their job.