"Three, two, one..." "I mean, I just think it'd be just fun to go to another planet." "Set up like cities out in space." "I think I want to go on a, on an Apollo mission so I can do a space walk." "Since the early 1960's, when the possibility of human space travel became reality, kids and adventurers of all ages, have dreamed of going into space themselves." "Sometime, in the twenty-first century, your children's children may very well fly Pan Am to the moon." "In 1968, Pan Am kicked off a curious ad campaign." "They were accepting reservations to guarantee seats on their future flights to the moon." "Ninety-three thousand people made reservations." "I was one of the first hundred to make a reservation for the moon flight." "I was working at the William Morris agency at the time and a very excited Albert Brooks, who was one of our clients at William Morris, came running into my offiice and saying that he just heard that Pan American Airways" "was taking reservations to the moon." "They were taking reservations if you wanted to go to the moon." "They were eventually going to have a ship that would go there." "I sent away for tickets for me and my future wife." "I didn't even think about maybe I'd have kids." ""Fares are not fully resolved and may be out of this world." "We ask you to be patient."" "Is twenty-eight years enough time to be patient?" "There is no environment more alien to the human body than the emptiness of space, where temperatures can fluctuate five hundred degrees." "Where, without the protection of a spaceship or a spacesuit, the vacuum would make blood boil." "It takes the most sophisticated machines ever built to get into space and the effects of long-term space travel on the human body are still being studied." "So why do so many people want to go?" "This whole idea of how, somehow through our exploration of what's out there, we could come in contact with our relationship to the divine," "is I think a big part of why we do this." "I think one of the real reasons for exploring space is to see if we're alone in the universe or whether there are other life-forms out there." "It's hard to think of a more important question from the point of philosophy, religion, sheer curiosity." "That's one of the main driving forces of my interest." "I want to find the aliens, too." "Ut-oh." "We've got company." "All right." "Watch it." "Whether searching for aliens, or even God, a basic reason for exploring space is simply, because it's there." "We're fascinated by pretty much any open frontier." "Think of the effort that went, in the first part of the century, in getting to the poles." "Or why did we keep trying to get to the top of Everest?" "It was simply a, a frontier that we hadn't been to and space is the same thing, which is why I think we have a long future in going to space." "Humans are natural nomads and, and we've always somehow been restless and moved around from one place to another for reasons we don't know." "I assume that'll continue to be true." "So there are lots of reasons why people might like to go." "And the simplest is just to get away from their neighbors and, and that's, I think, the fundamental instinct in many of us." "Another good reason for exploring space has only just been discovered." "We realize now that the earth is continually bombarded by asteroids and comets and, it doesn't happen very often, but when it does happen, the effects can be devastating." "Meanwhile, it would be a pretty good idea to establish a few other colonies on the Moon and Mars and elsewhere, so even if there was a major catastrophe to the planet Earth, some part of the human race will survive." "Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero!" "The American obsession with space began in 1957 with the news that the Soviet Union, the United States Cold War foe, had successfully launched a satellite into orbit." "The space race was on." "At an altitude of five hundred and sixty miles, at an estimated speed of eighteen thousand miles an hour, the first man-made satellite is orbiting through the heavens, sent there yesterday by Soviet Russia." "In 1961 the Soviets stunned the world again when they launched the first human-being into space." "About his trail-blazing, single orbit of the Earth," "Cosmonaut Uri Gagarin said," ""I looked and looked and looked but I didn't see God."" "The Soviets may not have found God, but they did find glory." "A few weeks later, the United States successfully managed to launch astronaut Allen Shepherd on a sub-orbital fleas jump, as the Soviets called it." "Shepherd's fifteen minute flight was technically into space, but just barely." "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." "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained." "President Kennedy became determined that the United States would be the first to land an astronaut on the moon." "For the progress of all men." "Kennedy didn't live to see his dream fulfilled." "When Apollo 11 reached the moon in 1969," "American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, became the first human-beings to step foot on another celestial body." "To realize that you've been blessed to do what very few people can, you, you, you just pinch yourself and say how, how, how lucky can I be to, to have done this?" "It's the highlight of a life because, unless you're going to hide you can't remove the fact that people are going to look at you differently." "Since those pioneering steps of Aldrin and Armstrong, only ten other people have been on the moon." "And fewer than four hundred have journeyed into space." "They got the flag up now and you can see the stars and stripes..." "Take the biggest roller-coaster you've ever ridden and multiply it by about ten." "That you have the opportunity for a, a lot of exciting things." "I don't think it's productive to sit there and think about all the many thousands, millions of things that can go wrong." "Very loud sounds, vibrations, shaking motion..." "Smoke and fire billowing up around the front windows." "The propellants that they use on the space shuttle are very, very potent and it's like a gigantic, controlled explosion that lasts for eight minutes to get you into orbit." "The space shuttle main engines are a very incredible device." "They generate enough force to levitate two hundred cars and they could hover them stationary in mid-air." "The fuel amount used is tremendous." "The turbo pumps that supply fuel to the engines pump enough liquid, it could drain a swimming pool in less than thirty seconds." "Space begins at the edge of the earth's atmosphere, fifty miles straight up." "But the shuttle orbits at an altitude of about a hundred eighty miles." "How does it get up there?" "Space travel is all based upon Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion." "This fundamental principle of rocket motion is three hundred years old and we've enlisted rocket scientist, Wayne Lee, to explain it." "Believe it or not, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand how a rocket works." "This balloon here is essentially a rocket that's powered by compressed air." "Uh, what happens is that, when the air rushes out, it propels the balloon forward up the string." "This is exactly Newton's Third Law at work." "When the balloon throws the air overboard, the opposite reaction propels the balloon up the string." "Wayne Lee put on ice skates for the first time in fifteen years." "All in the name of science." "Newton's Third Law says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." "So, simply stated, that says that I cannot push on something without that something pushing back on me with equal strength." "And so, as in this, in this example here, shows you how rockets work." "You can imagine that I'm the rocket and my partner here is the rocket fuel." "I am pushing off on the rocket fuel and that propels me in the other direction." "This is the crew of Apollo 13, wishing everyone there a nice evening and we're just about ready to close out our..." "For Film Director, Ron Howard, the most challenging aspect of recreating the drama of the Apollo 13 space flight, was figuring out how to show weightlessness." "We were doing something that no film company had ever done before and that was we were, we were actually trying to give the audience an authentic sense of what it, what space travel was like," "including the weightlessness." "Astronauts in space look like they're floating, but actually they're falling." "For this demonstration, Wayne Lee asked for a stunt double." "Surprisingly enough, weightlessness for an astronaut in space, and free-fall of a bungee-jumper back to earth, is exactly the same." "The difference is in the feeling." "An astronaut appears to float rather than fall because the walls and floor of the space shuttle is falling with the astronaut in orbit." "As a bungee-jumper however, you feel the air rushing past your face and you can see the ground coming up to meet you." "I thought there was a, that there was a weightless room, somehow." "I, I, I knew that, that astronauts practiced and I assumed that there was a place and I, to, to do it." "And I, I learned that uh, that doesn't exist but that they can simulate weightlessness in an airplane by doing a parabola, which is sort of like a big roller-coaster maneuver in in the sky." "As you're sort of going over this hump, it, it sort of tosses you and then the pilot flies the airplane in an arc that basically flys around you as you are free-falling." "You, you really can't wait for the next parabola." "I don't know if it's a throw back to some embryonic sort of recollection that we have or what, but it's very soothing and exhilarating and a lot of fun, you know, because, I never got to do this" "because I was always involved in every shot but, any time one of the actors was not in a scene, they didn't go and rest somewhere, they went to the back of the aircraft and on every parabola," "they would play Superman, because you felt like you were flying." "And there were all kinds of zero-g games going on there with Frisbees and footballs and stuff that that, that were, that were a lot of fun." "But it's an amazing feeling and always a little bit of a let down when you finally land and you're walking across the tarmac and, you know, all the usual rules apply." "When I'm falling on this ride, I feel weightless because I am falling with the car." "I've been lifted out of my seat." "This is the same feeling an astronaut will experience in the space shuttle." "They appear to be floating because they are falling around the earth with the space shuttle." "And it is this falling that give the illusion of floating." "There's nothing that matches the adventure of weightlessness in space, looking out and contemplating the void with the stars and the beauty and then looking back on earth where all the rest of the people are." "The unlucky people." "You're the lucky one because you're up in orbit." "How do those lucky few stay up in orbit?" "Back to the skating rink and Isaac Newton's laws of motion." "I chose this place because it's the best place on earth I could think of to show a frictionless motion similar to what you would experience in space." "Newton's First Law of Motion states that a body at rest, tends to remain at rest." "And a body in motion, tends to remain in motion, at a constant speed, in a straight line, unless acted upon by an outside force." "In other words, the puck doesn't move until the stick hits it." "And, the puck would slide continuously in a straight line, if nothing impeded its progress." "A hockey puck is not going to slide forever because there's friction between the puck and the ice that will eventually slow the puck down." "But in space, there really is no friction, so once you set something in motion, it's going to keep going until something stops it." "Gravity is an essential component for orbiting the earth because, without gravity, the spacecraft would fly away from the earth in a straight line and never come back." "And it's the gravity that supplies the force to keep it constantly circling the earth." "And speed keeps the spacecraft from being pulled back to the ground." "At a comfortable, orbital velocity like, seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour, the shuttle is going fast enough to fall around the curvature of the earth." "If the spacecraft slows, gravity pulls it down before the shuttle makes it around the curve." "When you're in space, now you are just automatically in that freedom of floating around and it, and it's a marvelous experience." "And you get to look outward, you realize the velocities that you've got as you see the earth a hundred, two hundred miles beneath you from a perspective that uh, you'd only get before from artists" "or maps or globes, but now it's there." "And you get to see Gibraltar and Spain and Mediterranean." "Now the space walk is fun because you're outside." "Your view is not as limited." "You can look all around you, see the stars." "And if you gaze over the sides, you can look down and see the earth beneath you." "But on the other hand, it's a lot of work because the suit is so bulky, it gets pressurized, therefore it resists every movement that you're trying to make." "It you want to squeeze your hand as if gripping a tool, the suit wants to spring your hand back." "If you want to raise your arm and turn the lights on on your helmet, the suit is attempting to spring your arm back to its extended position." "During a space walk, I am never scared." "I am never fearful and it is like a ballet because it is slow it is quiet, just like the background fans in this room." "This, what you're hearing in this room this is what you hear during a space walk." "A nice soft hum and that tells you that airflow is coming over your head that your water pumps are working." "And it is so slow, you put things here and it's this kind of business." "We circle the earth every ninety minutes, so you've got forty-five minutes of night and forty-five minutes of day, and then you go through this cycle over and over and over again." "You can actually look out and see the terminator between night and day coming towards you." "You've got brightness and you can look out and see the little gray area and then night as it moves toward you." "You move from daytime into night in just a matter of seconds." "Space, away from the sun, can be as cold as minus two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit." "In the sun, direct sunlight, it can be as warm as plus two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit." "As you leave the sunlight going into darkness, within a matter of seconds you can actually feel that temperature change." "Your suit has to stabilize the temperature for you." "Although orbiting earth is the experience of a lifetime for those lucky few who have done it, astronauts have been stuck in earth's orbit since the last Apollo mission to the moon in 1972." "The moon is a very desolate place." "I said so when I was there." "Magnificent desolation." "Magnificent because we got there with our little toy spacecraft and we pranced around for a while and that was a magnificent fulfillment." "But it's a desolate place." "Now the moon, in a sense, we did and it's not very interesting." "It's interesting perhaps as a place where we will get resources which we can put into orbit inexpensively and use to go further a field, but it's not a very good destination." "It's an offshore island." "It's not a new continent." "In 1993, an event occurred that underscored this attitude about the moon." "Been there, done that." "Sotheby's Auction House held a Russian space auction that some described as a going-out-of-business sale for the Post Communist Russian Space Program." "And five thousand dollars the bid now" "I need five thousand, six, seven thousand, eight thousand..." "Half way through the discussions with the Russians," "I asked them if we couldn't have something maybe that was on the moon or on Venus, you know." "One of the space probe probes that are on Venus or on Mars." "And they, they did not understand what on earth I was talking about." "I mean, it's there." "I mean, you can't sell something that's on Mars." "Finally, just before the auction, the still mystified Russians told Sotheby's they could sell the second robotic lunar rover the Soviets sent to the Moon, and yes, it was still up there." "Sixteen thousand dollars on the telephone." "I suppose this didn't just mystify the Russians, it also mystified some of my colleges here in our legal department really scratched their heads very hard about this one." "I had to make a long announcement about how we would not make any representations or warranties about the future of space salvage laws and all sorts of things like this, and there were questions about whether you charge sales" "tax and, you know." "And there were all lots of really bizarre questions they were trying to deal with." "This did mean something." "It really was a significant issue." "To be the first person to own something on another heavenly body," "I mean, that was a big deal." "It gave you bragging rights, at least, to say," ""I bid on something that was on another planet."" "The Lunar Rover ultimately went to an American for sixty-eight thousand, five hundred dollars." "Even before Pathfinder's spectacular mission, researchers had shifted their attention to the rusty world of Mars." "Astronaut Shannon Lucid, spent half a year in orbit on the Russian spacestation Mir." "But she's ready for a longer trip." "The one thing that I would really like to do would be to go to Mars." "I've been in space for six months and you know, especially from a personal standpoint, I know that it's not particularly a problem." "And, I've always had a real fascination with the planet Mars, just like so many people here on earth." "Traveling from earth to any locale beyond the moon, will involve a major expedition." "The distances are overwhelming." "To get a handle on the scale of the solar system, once again, we turn to Wayne Lee." "In our miniature model of the solar system, the earth has been shrunk to a half-inch marble." "I'm going to place the earth at the starting line of the track." "Now the Moon is a smaller marble, about a foot away from the earth." "Now I'm going to jog to mars." "Now I'm here at Mars, one hundred yards away from the earth on our miniature scale of the solar system." "If I wanted to get to Pluto, oh, I'd have to run fifteen more times around the track." "If I wanted to get to our nearest star, Proxemus Centauri," "I'd have to run all the way around the world once." "If earth were the size of a marble, Mars would be a hundred-yard dash." "But on the real-life scale of the solar system, a round trip excursion to Mars would take at least two years and it would be very expensive." "I don't think we are going to Mars in the next fifty years." "I just don't see any point in having a huge expenditure of public money on just the prestige trip to take a couple of people to Mars and bring them back, which is all you could do with the present technology." "I don't think it makes any sense and uh, I'm sorry for the astronauts because that's what they'd love to do." "Technology is evolving fast and, in twenty or thirty years time, it will be much easier to send people to Mars." "We'll have better technology." "People often look back nostalgically and say that the 1960's was the golden age of space exploration." "And I can say that's totally wrong." "The golden age of space exploration is way in the future." "We're in the very primitive first stages of the space exploration." "And we'll do Mars and we will do Europa and we'll be all over the solar system." "It may take a thousand years but there's plenty of time in the future." "What we'll have to master is a game of inter-planetary pool." "A mission of gravity." "In order to travel between the planets you have to first escape the pull of the earth's gravity Once you do that, Newton's First Law, if you apply that you might think you could just point your rocket at the planet, fire your engines," "and then coast to the other planet." "In reality, that doesn't work because the pull of the sun's gravity will tend to pull you off course." "So we have to take into account the fact that all of the planets are in orbit around the sun and what we do at NASA in order to launch a spacecraft to another planet we put it in an orbit around the sun that intercepts the planet that" "we're trying to visit." "Another method involves getting a velocity boost by first heading in the wrong direction and using gravity as a slingshot." "The future in space, depends upon cheaper access It costs over three hundred fifty million dollars every time the shuttle launches." "But NASA has determined that it could cut launch costs with a modern, fully reusable spacecraft." "The shuttle is the world's finest launch vehicle in 1997." "The shuttle in 1997 is a quarter of a century old." "The computer on the shuttle is not as powerful as your desktop." "We are trying to invent a new machine that's never been built before." "It's called a single-stage to orbit." "It's just like an airplane." "Everything it takes off with it lands with." "So you didn't, don't need different systems and you don't need a lot of people." "From designs submitted by major aerospace companies," "NASA chose Lockheed Martin's Venture Star Project for further development." "Venture Star is our dream of the future." "Weighs uh, roughly something over two million pounds at lift off, will carry a payload uh, which uh, is about the same as what the space shuttle can carry." "If the Venture Star succeeds, it will eventually replace the shuttle for moving astronauts and equipment back and forth between earth and the future international spacestation" "That project will consume a significant portion of NASA's resources for pilot admissions for the next decade." "I have ambiguous feelings about the international spacestation." "I may be biased..." "because of course, in 2001 it was a nice rotating ring with the artificial gravity." "Whereas, the spacestation planned now is frankly, an orbiting pile of junk, from the look of it." "We need a spacestation." "We're going to have to have one eventually." "But it's the right spacestation, at the right time, with the right price tag." "I wouldn't care to get involved in that argument." "The international spacestation is happening, yet it remains controversial." "The project's been driven by politicians for political reasons and it's so large and it's such an important source ofjobs and it's such a, it's just a huge welfare program for the aerospace industry." "And whether it's any use or not it's never really been the question." "It's better to think about it like the freeway system." "The interstate highways." "When they built them, nobody had to justify that they were going to have this factory here and this retail distributor here and this car dealer over here." "We didn't know what was going to happen but we did know that if we had a way of communicating and transferring things, the economic engine would be turned on Same thing's true in space." "The most interesting thing to me about the spacestation is not the spacestation itself." "It's the fact that, there's going to be a place in space that'll be a sort of downtown." "I think the interesting thing is not the station, but the neighborhoods around the station." "I would love, for example, to get the concession to be the green grocer for the station and the community that builds up around it." "This is our first step to provide a facility that lets people do whatever the future holds, but you have to have faith." "After the astronauts set up their orbiting city, it will be time for the rest of us to boldly go where no tourist has gone before." "A tourist in space." "I think I would, if given the opportunity." "I really think that I, I would." "Yes." "Without a doubt." "Yes, ma'am." "I surely would." "No, I wouldn't." "No I wouldn't." "I'd love to go as far as I could." "What I'd most like to do is meet somebody else out there." "With a hundred billion galaxies, there's got to be somebody else out there." "A lot of others." "I'm so spaced out living in Washington DC, that I don't have ambition, not today anyway, to go elsewhere." "With all the regulations, I could see it being hampered for another twenty to thirty years." "The idea is extremely popular and most people, that's the majority of the populations of the countries we've questioned say, that if possible, they'd like to go to space." "And a substantial group, maybe between a third and a half, say they'd spend about three month's salary." "Everyone, this is Robbie the Robot." "Nice to meet you." "Robbie's going to fill you in on the schedule." "First, we'd like everyone to get settled into their rooms." "Shimisu, one of biggest construction companies in Japan, has already imagined an orbiting hotel." "George Jetson is Conrad Hilton." "Living in zero gravity is extremely uh, enjoyable." "So if you have a hotel, where you've got picture-windows, zero-gravity bars, zero-gravity discotheques, Karaoke bars." "I think that guests will, they won't want to go home." "Are you coming back?" "You bet!" "There's no where on earth that's as much fun as this place." "Me, too." "Maybe next time, it'll be my honeymoon." "I might give them a couple of, couple of flights just to, let them, let them shake out the bugs." "But so I wouldn't necessarily want to be on the maiden voyage." "But, I think it'd be pretty hard to keep me off after that." "I would love to have that perspective." "I would love to be able to be out there and look back at the earth and get a different sense of how I fit in to the universe." "Let's separate out dreams and plans from the tourism industry." "There's only one thing that's holding back tourism." "Ten thousand dollars a pound for reusable vehicles." "When we're able to get the cost of space travel down to hundreds of dollars a pound, there will be a tourism industry." "It's as simple as that." "While pursuing a twenty-five thousand dollar prize," "Charles Lindberg risked death by flying the Spirit Of St. Louis across the Atlantic." "The outcome was the birth of a multi-billion dollar aviation industry leading to airplane tickets cheap enough for tourists." "Space tourists could eventually rocket into space in a ship designed for something called "The X Prize"." "It's a ten million dollar prize for the first private spacecraft that carries three people, sixty-two miles up, beyond the edge of space, twice within two weeks." "In the same way that daring entrepreneurs eventually got average people into the sky, modern visionaries mean to get them into space." "By trial and error." "We're talking about pushing the edge of human capabilities." "We're talking about frontiers." "And frontiers always come at a price." "The X Prize is dangerous." "We are pushing the edge of space We're, we're, we're proving the paradigm that governments aren't the only ones who can launch people into space." "Who knows?" "The winner of the X Prize could be the pioneering spirit behind all kinds of new commercial uses of space." "Within ten or fifteen years, the way you're going to get to Tokyo, your first class ticket will be a sub-orbital flight where in fact you rocket out of a New York airport and go to altitude a hundred kilometers out of the atmosphere" "and, literally on a, on a sub-orbital flight, re-enter over Japan and land" "And that all takes thirty to forty-five minutes." "We can very clearly see a time when, if something absolutely, positively has to be on the other side of the planet in forty-five minutes, like my letter or my package, uh, we can do that." "We can have ultra-rapid courier delivery." "You know in the old days, you used to have the packages marked with "Airmail"?" "Well you're going to have start to mark it "Spacemail"." "Long before spacemail, there is already a brand new space business." "Space memorial services." "Right now, currently orbiting earth, are seven grams each of the cremated remains of counter-culture icon Timothy Leary and of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenbury, among other space enthusiasts." "The idea has been there and we just saw that there was a worldwide interest in the service and now, technology and, and economics have allowed us to do it so that people can afford it." "In just talking with the people that have made the choice uh, to go with Celestis, they'll walk outside and see a shooting star on a dark night and think" ""That's where my husband needs to be."" "Some believe that space memorial services represent just a glimmer of the potential business in space." "There are multi-billion or trillion dollar industries out there." "The things that we as humans find most precious, real estate, energy, materials that's, that's, you know, in spades in space." "A half kilometer nickel iron asteroid, and there are tons of them, mega tons of them in space." "One of those asteroids on today's nickel-iron or platinum group metal markets is worth on the order of thirty trillion dollars." "There is a phenomenal amount of wealth in space." "You know, when I grew up, I always wanted to be an astronaut miner and I hope I get a chance to do it." "Imagine this." "You work for Acme Mining and Engineering in Colorado and you've just received a letter stating that you and your family are being transferred." "To an asteroid." "The first space colonies will probably be out-growths of some space industry that requires on-site human management." "But ultimately, people will create colonies off the planet Earth for the same reasons they have always pushed beyond boundaries." "We're explorers." "So going back to the moon and going back to Mars to stay, is find those volunteers, those early settlers, who want to go make their life there and take the risk." "I know I'd go in a heartbeat." "I know probably a hundred or a thousand people who'd go with me or go on their own," "I mean, it's, it's, it's now." "It's in our lifetime that we're going to make that transition." "Because people need oxygen, water and food, to name the basics, creating habitable environments in space is challenging and expensive." "Why send people at all?" "Robots are more and more capable." "And they're expendable." "You don't have to be concerned with bringing them back home at the end of the mission." "We know that machines tolerate accelerations and general conditions that humans would die instantly in those conditions." "So you can say well, logically, the future of space belongs to machines." "Except I don't believe that I believe that humans will be in space for the best possible reason which is, we want to go there." "There's, there's a place for both." "For both robotic explorers and for human explorers And I think throughout you know, the history of space exploration, we've had the robotic explorers but, it's the human exploration that really captures the imagination" "and it really captures the soul of exploration and the soul of the human being." "The robotic spacecraft really are extensions of our senses." "They're our eyes and ears They're the way we can currently explore places we cannot go." "In fact, Voyager I, a robotic spacecraft launched twenty years ago, is now heading out of the solar system towards the stars." "Because Voyager I would be the first envoy of man ever to venture beyond our tiny section of the universe, the late Carl Sagan headed up a cross-disciplinary team to determine exactly what messages from earth should be sent along." "Ultimately the spacecraft was launched carrying a gold-coated record containing one hundred eighteen photographs and a large selection of music and sounds of earth." "Including greetings in fifty-five different languages." "That's Gugerati for" ""Greetings from a human-being of the earth." "Please contact."" "I think it was our sending which was the most important symbol rather than the idea that anything would ever actually receive the message." "It was the fact that we, as a civilization, had reached the threshold of being able to send such a message." "Nevertheless, effort went into deciding what messages from Earth should be sent with Voyager I because the possibility of the messages being received, by something or someone, captivated so many people." "Would you lay out on the fields and look at the dark sky and look at all the stars and you see all these thousands and thousands and thousands of stars and you think of possibility of other solar systems." "It's just very diffiicult to conceive that we are the only intelligent beings in this vast universe." "For me, if we could find a single cell of life that lives off rock and water, it would say that we have an understanding that life is not unique to this planet." "I would be satisfied with a single living cell." "Beyond that, would be only gravy." "We may find life on Mars, if we're lucky but intelligent life, we probably have to go in stellar distances and maybe long in stellar distances maybe in thousands of light years, to find the friends and" "neighbors that we would so much love to converse with." "Thing about these Martian totem heads, sure are spooky looking things, aren't they?" "Major didn't think so." "We'll see lots of them in that Conican city we're going to visit." "The totem heads are supposed to guard their cities." "I think human-beings have a tendency to fear that which we do not know." "We do have a tendency to when portraying life from other parts of the galaxy, often times, it is a, a, a very menacing presence that comes to visit." "Alien intelligence is not, that's not scary to me." "Uh, but then, I haven't been really confronted with it so now, it's just fun to talk about." "But if some alien guy walked in and he grabbed me by the throat and took me up to his space house, I'd say, "Now I'm scared!"" "Space holds such a fascination for us because of what it represents to us." "Because of what it's come to represent, you know." "That vastness being the unknown." "That vastness, the mind-boggling distance from earth to even the nearest star, puts a crimp in turning human star travel fantasies into reality anytime soon." "The chief problem, there's a speed limit." "In the laws of physics, the speed of light is the fundamental speed limit and that's about a hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second." "And that's what really limits us in terms of being able to travel to the stars." "If you wanted to go to the nearest star Proximus Centauri That's four point three light years away which means, you'd have to be going at the speed of light for over four years just to get there." "The thing about inter-stellar travel of course, is that it's enormously bigger enterprise than tootling around the solar system." "I am sure that we will conquer light speed." "Now I may not see it in my lifetime, but some scientist or some physicist, somewhere along the line, will develop the techniques and the machinery to conquer light speed." "I think inter-stellar travel is going to be fantastic It's going to be fascinating." "And that's when we're going to start meeting some of the other beings that are in the universe." "Whether or not we ever crack the barrier of the speed of light, most agree that some day humans will find a way to travel among the stars." "You stand here and, and you know, you give that signal and you just kind of particulate and appear somewhere else." "Beam me up, Scottie and then they're gone, so." "That's all I know about it." "Well, in "Star Trek" they sort of break you down into atoms and just take you apart really and then they can transfer your body into a radio signal and they can beam you to different spots." "And Scottie is a technician, you know." "He's the most famous." "Everybody loves Scottie." "And beam me up, and he's the one who always beams you up so everybody yells, "Beam me up, Scottie."" "Whenever they want to go somewhere." "Science fiction to me has always tended to pose two of the most powerful words in the English language." "What if?" "What if?" "And, and by asking ourselves that question, we have demonstrated time and time again the remarkable ability to go on an answer that question and some really clever, phenomenally clever, ways." "Some credible theories for inter-stellar travel, originated as science fiction solutions for getting around the light speed limit." "You have to plan for a journey that would take at least thirty thousand years at today's fastest speed." "We could launch a self-contained, a bio-dome, okay, into space, which would be completely self-renewing with plants and animals and everything else." "I don't know how big it would have to be." "And we could launch that, quite slowly, off to the stars." "Assuming that it's a multi-generation ship so that people live just as we do here on earth and that they survive and that they don't run out of some vital components or run into a rock or something like this." "Eventually, and the eventually is the big point, they get to the stars." "While this kind of multi-generation spaceship is theoretically possible, a bio-dome experiment, here on earth, didn't work very well." "Crops critical for producing air and food, died." "And the volunteers got on each other's nerves." "Going into suspended animation, I would think, is a more practical way." "Just go into the deep freeze for five hundred years and so then you, come, come out bright and cheerful when you come to the end." "And saves a lot of this intermediate boredom." "In Hollywood, deep freezing bodies for lengthy inter-stellar trips, has been a popular method for space travel." "But it never seems to go right." "Alpha control, final analysis of the Gemini 12's flight indicates, unhappily, that the spaceship has either been destroyed or must be presumed lost in space." "There's danger Will Robinson." "For the moment, star travel is purely theoretical, except by telescope." "And NASA's extraordinary new origins telescope project is going to take earthlings on a very strange trip." "The origins telescope will be able to spot planets orbiting distant stars." "About as diffiicult as seeing a firefly next to a search light in Moscow." "From New York." "By analyzing the light, astronomers will determine which planets has atmospheres that could support life." "We would like to place this planet finder telescope out around, say in the orbit around, near Jupiter because in near the sun there's a lot of dust in our solar system which scatters sunlight and that would be a background which would make it diffiicult to see," "for us to see very faint light coming from other solar systems I think our exploration of other solar systems in our search for life elsewhere, will for a, for many, many decades, really involve this" "remote of observations with increasingly sophisticated observation systems because it is so diffiicult, in fact, we don't know how to get there." "Of course, ultimately, as we've learned with our own solar system, you, you really do learn a great deal more by going there." "People thought we'd never fly and, of course, we flew." "People thought we'd never fly faster than sound." "Of course, we fly faster than sound everyday." "People thought we'd never travel into space." "We travel into space." "And now, robotic spacecraft are on their way out of the solar system." "Who knows what's in store?" "I believe in in twenty to twenty-five years, we will have a permanent base on the moon." "In twenty to twenty-five years, I believe we will have already been to" "Mars and the first human footprint will have been on Mars." "We might have a research station on an asteroid with people." "And I think, in fifty years, space travel will be much more routine." "I, I think that a, a hotel and a Pan Am shuttle, or whatever company might do it, is not out of the question." "In five hundred years, we will be all over the solar system." "Humans and their attendant machines, will be exploring and active and have bases everywhere through the solar system." "A few things we know." "Our future in space is certain." "The space age is in its infancy." "And each generation will push the edge." "There are no final frontiers." "When our children can't dream and believe their dreams are going to come true," "I'm not sure we have a society that's worth while." "And for me, I'm a rocket scientist." "Space is my vehicle." "Two, one..."