3 Quotes Tagged: spaceflight

The scope and audacity of John Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, message to a joint session of Congress on “Urgent National Needs” — the speech that launched the Apollo program — dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not yet conceived, navigation and docking schemes not yet devised, in order to send a man to an unknown world — a world not yet explored, not even in a preliminary way, not even by robots — and we would bring him safely back, and we would do it before the decade was over. This confident pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved Earth orbit.

One consequence of this train of argument is that, even if civilizations commonly arise on planets throughout the Galaxy, few of them will be both long-lived and nontechnological. Since hazards from asteroids and comets must apply to inhabited planets all over the Galaxy, if there are such, intelligent beings everywhere will have to unify their home worlds politically, leave their planets, and move small nearby worlds around. Their eventual choice, as ours, is spaceflight or extinction.

The blue distance, the mysterious Heavens, the example of birds and insects flying everywhere — are always beckoning Humanity to rise into the air.