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Quotations about exploration | |
There's a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Fall in love with some activity, and do it! The world is like a mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. And I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them. If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. I think we are in a little bit of a moon race even if no one admits it publicly. China has met good on every one of their promises when they said, "We're going to put an astronaut, a taikonaut into orbit." They did that. They're going to build a space station, they're doing that. And so they want to say, declare they want to go to the moon, we should really take them seriously. If we feel threatened by that in any way, this is the kind of response that that triggers. That's why we went to the moon in the first place. Our cleansed memory of that period is, "Oh we're Americans and we're explorers." Well, we were in the middle of a Cold War, and we got scared when Russia, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and we had to respond in some way for our own dignity, for our own place in the world. So a lot of things drive space exploration beyond just scientific motives. To our knowledge, life exists on only one planet, Earth. If something bad happens, it's gone. I think we should establish life on another planet -- Mars in particular -- but we're not making very good progress. SpaceX is intended to make that happen. |
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