Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The...

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.

Ah, youth!It was a beautiful night…The moon was out of orbit.The stars were awry.But everything else was exactlyas it should have been.

Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its...

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he’d like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, “A loving husband and devoted father,” though in reality, he jokes in “Riding...

Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process...

Isn’t antimatter what fuels the U.S.S.Enterprise?

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame...

Ideally, the ISS program will just be one more incremental step on an expanding, incredible journal of exploration and understanding, taking us higher and farther.

That was a hell of a thing.

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.[Address at Rice University, September 12 1962]

You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren’t necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in...

Smiling now, Michael Dawn sat on his rooftop, gazing at the stars above him, just like men had done for thousands of years. Out there lay secrets and mysteries that an eternity could never unravel,...

Radical space technologies never reach the public because unknown groups do not wish humanity to have access to the highest knowledge or the most advanced scientific inventions. Perhaps this suppression is out of fear that...

Don’t just discover . . . Encounter!

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even...

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before–and thus was the Empire forged.

No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’‘And what...

Normal people have rock collections, shell collections, key ring collections and stamp collections. (The Captain had even known somebody with a letterbox collection.) But a people collection? That had to be the most bizarre one...

Everybody was hoping for something, talking about our new life to come and all that they hoped from it. Fresh air, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Real gravity, instead of the fake kind that broke...

You can’t show me the Earth from space and fly right past the moon, entice me into this magical machine and invite me to come with you, and then ask me to stay behind!

THERE IT IS,’ my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we’ve been nearing for weeks, the one that’s been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has...

Sometime we don’t always get what we want!” shouted Evie, not knowing herself. “That’s life!”… The Captain, still looking at her, raised his eyebrows in surprise. He was proud of her for being brave enough...

The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we’ll need the wisdom of the old Einstein — humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens...

Because you are a romantic,” his pedia said.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing...