QUOTES by Rick Tumlinson
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
It was the summer of 1968 or so, and Dad and my little brother were out camping. While up in the mountains, my brother was bitten by a rattlesnake. As they raced back to the base, my dad sucked out the venom and used his hands as a tourniquet and probably save his life, for it was a serious bite, and he was just a little kid.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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It is in the failures of our striving that we find ourselves, and it is then, in the rising above them and trying again, that we carry ourselves to the next level. If the runner stumbles, they get up and run again.
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Like most Americans, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I am pro-future, pro-hope, and pro-abundance. I am pro-frontier and will talk to and work with anyone else who shares my belief that it is our goal and destiny to expand life and civilization into space.
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I want to capture and express that passion I see in life all around me to go wild, to push into anywhere we can, and make of those places new domains for life.
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Life comes forth for no other reason than to be and make more life. It will fight and crawl and do anything in its power to live, and once alive, it will stand against all to remain alive. Its existence is its own argument.
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I want the government to focus on the stuff we cannot yet do, like beginning to learn how we can live in space long enough to go to Mars or how to build and operate human communities on the Moon and Mars.
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The opening of the Frontier is not an engineering problem. It is not a money problem. It is a challenge to our ability to decide to make it happen and to think and act the right way to get the results we want, we need, we demand.
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The opening of space to human development and settlement is the most important activity of the human species. From hope to health, from wonder to wealth, the environment, and the very act of living, space is the future.
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I guess it's human nature, as every group breaks into factions, yet at a time when we are trying to be taken seriously, it can confuse people - especially when it moves from being about where you want to go and what you want to do to why the others are idiots.
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The Moon! Mars! Asteroids! Rockets! Helium 3! Space solar power! Space tourism! We go through fads, swarm around the hero de jour, and spend far too much time trashing the other guy's ideas in favor of our own.
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I am a spacer. It is what and who I am. It is my cause and my life. I am not an enthusiast, a fan, or supporter. It is what I exist to do here on Earth. And there are many of us; some, like Elon Musk, are very high profile.
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Congress often covers the exposed crotch of our human spaceflight program with the figleaf of science when it's an obvious lie to justify the pumping of billions of dollars into the belly of an ever-voracious aerospace industrial complex. And yes, of course space is dangerous.
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The first credible humans-to-Mars plans are starting to weave together in public-private partnerships. In fact, I can say with some authority that this will also be the case in terms of the Moon and asteroids as well.
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We require, as a species, the difference between what is safe and unsafe to define ourselves. Be it in darkness or in light, where we are means nothing without the comparison to the other place - where we are not. And thus it is the difference between them that tells us who and what we are.
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We often mistake the artificial chemical and psychological thrill of fake edges for the real. In fact we often seek them out as a substitute for the reality of change, growth and exploration. Our minds and bodies help us in this, as they react much the same to this simulations as to the real world.
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We do not become an astronaut because we fear not only the risk of space, but we fear the risk of failure along the way more than we want to put in the work to make it happen - and it is easier not to try.
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There are moments in time when the coincidence of art and reality interact to allow us a glimpse into the context of history. The release of the Christopher Nolan film 'Interstellar' a few days after two catastrophes in our space endeavor gives us one of those moments.
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From John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, presidents have rhetorically opened the door to the frontier for us, and each time, we have turned away to fight over destinations, technologies, and timing.
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I do not expect NASA to go out and build settlements and colonies. I do not expect them to give SpaceX all the money needed to colonize Mars. I do not expect them to realize the future of humanity is contingent on harvesting the wealth of the solar system overnight and suddenly subsidize my asteroid mining project.
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Space is big. The whole point of the frontier is that we go there to do new things in new places - not one place, and not one thing, but all of the above.
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There was nothing technical or physical stopping us from having moved on from Apollo to a permanent Moonbase, the development of industries in space, and the establishment of the first human communities on Mars. We could have - we can - do it anytime we actually decide that it is our goal, organize ourselves to make it happen, and Just Do It.
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I've been doing a few interviews since the loss of the SpaceX Dragon on its way to the Space Station. Each one very quickly questions the viability of what they call commercial space in light of the failure. I tell them space is hard: this is what happens early in a program with new technology.
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All the best to SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and, yes, the Progress teams, who are all working on their own solutions to open the frontier along with Boeing and the rest of the fliers trying to fly, all of whom I know personally share the dream. This isn't their fault; they just want to make things fly.
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China, Russia and India are shooting for the Moon. United Arab Emirates says Mars. Other private citizens and companies are heading either to Mars, asteroids, or the Moon.
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We go to learn about our solar system, to search for life, and to understand what happened to Mars so we avoid it ourselves.
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Support space-resource and industrial infrastructure. Multibillion-dollar satellites or voyagers to Mars and beyond, if we don't live off the land, we will always only be visitors or wire stringers in territories we do not inhabit or control.
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Government paved the on-ramp to space. Now, the vehicles taking us up to the space highway are being built by citizens, leveraging off government-catalyzed technologies and needs.
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We are threatened by long-unresolved issues between the melting pot of cultures that make up our nation. People are isolated, every day less united, and every day falling deeper into a new level of cultural despair.
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To settle space, we will have to develop the ability to harvest and utilize the resources of the solar system, such as ores, ice, and the rays of the sun itself at levels of efficiency that will transform our relationship to our own planet Earth.
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Our greatest theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, recently declared that humans have no more than a hundred years to get off this planet to ensure the survival of our species. And when someone such as he does so, it is with an understanding not just of the science, but of both our tenuous place and our possibility in the universe.
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