Space has always fascinated me. As a young boy looking up at the stars, I found it impossible to resist thinking what was out there and if I ever would experience space first-hand.

The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting: the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected.

When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people – for a long time, anyway – are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.

Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.

I know Elon, we’re very like minded in many ways. We’re not conceptual twins. One thing I want us to do is go to Mars, but for me it’s one thing. He’s singularly focused on that. I think motivation wise, for me I don’t find that Plan B idea motivating. I don’t want a plan B for Earth, I want Plan B to make sure Plan A works.

Worship is transcendent wonder.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It’s sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.

Like other kids wanted to become firemen or astronauts, I wanted to make people laugh.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

Even Hubble hasn’t found yet the end of this universe, and we don’t know that it has any end.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It’s an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn’t sustainable.

I create stars.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Many admire, few know.

Technology is huge; I wanted to learn about it. People might say that’s odd, but I think it’s odd if artists aren’t interested in the world around them. I’m always chasing that.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

The moon gravitates towards the earth and by the force of gravity is continually drawn off from a rectilinear motion and retained in its orbit.

The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that it basically just says, ‚Look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let’s do it close to each other.‘ That way… you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, ‚I’m out of eggs. What have you got?‘

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

I’m astounded by people who want to ‚know‘ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

I used to always sit in church looking out the windows at the boys, wondering if I could make an excuse to go out and, you know, go to the bathroom because all the outdoor toilets. But anyhow, I was only going out to see the boys.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.

I love trying new things.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Two kids in their dorm room can’t start anything important in space today. That’s why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space, to build that transportation network.

We fly to 106 kilometers. We’ve always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn’t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you’re an astronaut or not.

When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?

If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

I wanted to become an illustrator as a child.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

Even if you’re happy with the life you’ve chosen, you’re still curious about the other options.

I do not recognize the right of the public to break in the front door of a man’s private life in order to satisfy the gaze of the curious… I do not think it right to dissect living men even for the advancement of science. So far as I am concerned, I prefer a post mortem examination to vivisection without anaesthetics.

It sometimes feels like a strange movie, you know, it’s all so weird that sometimes I wonder if it is really happening.

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

I’m not lesbian; I’m not bisexual; I’m not straight. I’m just curious.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

We’ve gotta reinvest in space travel. We should’ve never left the moon.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.