A Quote by Sally Ride

Eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help. Whether it's going to be a consortium or one entity remains to be seen. I could be wrong. I could be one of the old fogies! Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing. It happens. A company has to be willing to bear the risk of its rocket failing. It's a very large capital investment.

Sally Ride

Quote Topics

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Quote Author

Sally Ride
American - Astronaut
May 26, 1951 - July 23, 2012

I think eventually private enterprise will be able to send people into orbit, but I suspect initially it's going to have to be with NASA's help.

Sally Ride

Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.

Sally Ride

What patients want is not rocket science, which is really unfortunate because if it were rocket science, we would be doing it. We are great at rocket science. We love rocket science. What we’re not good at are the things that are so simple and basic that we overlook them.

Laura Gilpin

When I was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, this is where the space and rocket center was. This is where all of the German rocket scientists came after war and started designing rockets for NASA, for the moon landing and all that.

Jimmy Wales

Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection.

Henry Spencer

The expense of getting into space is the rocket launch, the rocket itself. Rocket's right now, commercial rockets cost probably somewhere between $50, or $120, or $150 million per launch. And those are all expendable. That is, you've got to buy a new rocket for each launch. So, that really is the critical part. If there was some kind of really, a revolutionary breakthrough and the price of rockets fell by an order of magnitude, I mean, just imagine what that would do as far as getting access to more ordinary people.

Leroy Chiao

And so whether it's failing to move forward on the Dream Act, failing to move forward on putting teachers back to work, failing to do all the things we could do right now to help the economy and middle class, this Congress is just saying no.

David Plouffe

Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.

Norman Mailer

This is not rocket science - climate science is very simple. A 12-year-old could probably understand this subject [of climate change].

Arthur B. Robinson

Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a "space station" in ... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945)

Arthur C. Clarke

The fear of failing... not quite the fear of failing, but the uncertainty of whether you are going to perform or not, is there every single game I have played in my life. It will always be there.

AB de Villiers

I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back.

Eric Allin Cornell

With space travel, [it's] no different. You know, in 1990 I read the name Virgin Galactic Airways. Loved the name. And set out to try to find an engineer or rocket scientist in the world who could build a safe, reusable rocket that could take people to and from space and we could start a whole new era of commercial space travel.

Richard Branson

I'm not going to take anyone else's word for it, or NASA, or especially Elon Musk with SpaceX. I'm going to build my own rocket right here and I'm going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on.

Mike Hughes

Large solid rockets have never been a very good way to build launchers that might have crews on top, especially because of the problems in getting the crew away from a failing launcher.

Henry Spencer

I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.