Rick Tumlinson

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“From the moment those images of Buzz and Neil arrived on the world's television sets, our human space program has been lost - for a blatantly simple and obvious reason - after the first giant leap to take that first small step, there was no plan for the next one, because there was no second question to be answered.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Robotics, manufacturing, medicine, farming, energy - all will be pushed to and beyond their limits and, by so doing, will advance at speeds far faster than without the impetus and challenge of opening a frontier - thus also raising the odds of survival in our favor.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I am a Leaper: a person who - thanks to some mathematical errors tied to the cosmic interactions of Earth and Sun and bad math on the part of some old timers long ago - is lost in time, born on a day that simply doesn't exist three out of four years.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Life is an affirmation, not a defamation. Life means living. Life means taking that one tiny or giant leap beyond what you know you can do, or simply beyond what you know. It is in these moments that we live.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Your birthday happens each year on exactly the same day. It is a solid thing, a dependable thing, a measure of your life broken down into 365 subunits. For a Leaper, it is a bit different. For us, the basic assumption is shattered from the beginning.”

“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.”