How We'll Live on Mars Quotes

“If we get it wrong, if we repeat the mistakes of our past, the consequences could be devastating. But if we get it right, the potential benefits to the future of humanity are astonishing.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“When the first humans set foot on Mars, the moment will be more significant in terms of technology, philosophy, history, and exploration than any that have come before it, all because we will no longer be a one-planet species.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Think about what we knew of biology and chemistry three hundred years ago, in the early 1700s. Then imagine what we will know three hundred years from now, in the early 2300s. Most of what we know now will seem quaint.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“If Mars does not have the water we think it does, we will not be able to live there.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“NASA’s years of slip-sliding away—and the fact that it allowed contractors to work on a cost-plus basis—created a huge hole for entrepreneurs to walk through. The 135 shuttle missions ended up costing an average of more than $1 billion each. Somebody ought to be able to do what NASA did better, faster, and cheaper.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Wernher von Braun. As his designs, built on Goddard’s inventions, rained ruin on London, von Braun’s genius for rocketry became all too obvious. He gave Adolf Hitler”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“The truth is that it has been possible to reach Mars for at least thirty years. Within a decade or so of the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on Earth’s moon, we could have landed humans on the Red Planet. Almost every technology required has long been available. We simply have not chosen to pursue the opportunity.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“We are rapidly reaching a point where humans, not nature, will be in control of our own evolution. There is no reason not to adapt that knowledge to make our backup planet a desirable place to live.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“NASA, fortunately, has already tackled the oxygen problem. When it launches the successor to the Curiosity rover in 2020, it will carry a type of fuel cell that will turn Mars’s atmospheric CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“home worth $500,000. Perhaps she hates her job and decides to sell everything to buy a one-way ticket to Mars from SpaceX, with enough money left over to finance a small business.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“So, if we could use the same Falcon 9 rocket a thousand times, then the capital costs would go from being $60 million per flight to $60,000 per flight. Obviously, that’s a humongous difference.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Musk recently said that “2017 is probably a realistic expectation of when we’ll send a human into space for the first time.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Unmanned spacecraft must therefore use artificial intelligence software to make decisions in emergencies, because there’s no time to call home for help.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“The first Earth object ever to reach the surface of Mars was a Soviet lander called Mars 2.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“There are no foreseeable shortcuts in the next twenty years that could get us to Mars in much less than 250 days each way,”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“fact, according to Musk, space travel since the Apollo program not only hasn’t moved forward much, it has gone “backward.” He says, “Once we could go to the moon, and now we can’t. That’s not forward, or even sideways. The United States can’t even send people into orbit right now.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Although today is sunny and relatively warm—about 50 degrees Fahrenheit—temperatures will plunge as darkness approaches, turning the environment into something akin to a bad night at the South Pole.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Wind shapes the dunes in this crater into a V-like formation, akin to migrating birds in flight.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google cofounder Larry Page. Planetary Resources’ lead was followed in 2013 by a firm called Deep Space Industries. Its website currently looks like a science fiction film setting, with illustrations of CubeSats, scouting vehicles, and huge mining spacecraft assembled in space and never intended to enter a planet’s atmosphere.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Even the most optimistic scenarios for reengineering the Martian atmosphere are projected to take nine hundred years. Yet within that time frame, humans are likely to make astounding progress, and there is reason to assume we will be successful.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“The cheapest way to warm Mars may be to use bacteria that convert nitrogen and water into ammonia or that can create methane out of water and carbon dioxide. The”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“I believe it is time to explode once and for all the theory of the solitary space rocket and its little band of bold interplanetary adventurers,” von Braun wrote. “No such lonesome, extra-orbital thermos bottle will ever escape earth’s gravity and drift toward Mars.”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“They must also inflate “buildings”—domed, pressurized tents made of exotic materials that will increase their living area and act as greenhouses in which to grow food. Some environmental similarities”
― Stephen L. Petranek, How We'll Live on Mars

“Within a decade, the internal combustion engine automobile is likely to look exactly like what it is - a machine that converts gasoline into much more heat than forward motion, a bizarre antiquity.”
― Stephen Petranek, Unser Leben auf dem Mars: TED Books