Peter Diamandis Quotations

so important to the future of space exploration and space travel.

My interest is simple. Since the age of 9 I wanted to fly in space,

My goal is to create an event that will be the Oshkosh or Grand Prix of space an event that will attract space fans and families from around the world who want to come and see these rocket-powered ships fly, and meet the entrepreneurs building them,

Now we must keep the competition going, and help push the envelope faster, higher, and cheaper, to build the safe spaceships that will carry all of us to space. To this end, we have partnered with the state of New Mexico to create the X Prize Cup, to attract tens of thousands of people each year to New Mexico to see the spaceships of tomorrow take racing to new heights,

New aerospace technologies coupled with the spirit of competition will not only extend the boundaries of entertainment, but continue the public's appetite for space ignited a year ago when the Ansari X-Prize was awarded.

Our hope is that the X Prize Cup activities will help bring suborbital tourism operators to the southern New Mexico site for year-round passenger launch operations.

It is definitely an unusual flight trajectory. But it is not a dangerous flight trajectory.

We're creating an event that has multiple things happening over two-weeks and during a fixed period of time. There's going to be lots going on.

You have raised a tide that will bring billions of dollars into the industry and fund other teams to compete. We will begin a new era of spaceflight.

Today we have made history. Today we go to the stars.

We're not seeing any breakthroughs in physics or materials science here,

We need to be willing to take risks we were willing to at the beginning of space exploration and every other frontier, ... We're not going to have these breakthroughs until we have a profitable industry.

We expect that the first X Prize Cup will actually occur in the summer of 2006. We have a couple of years to get the infrastructure in place, ... We're basically creating a new business model for the whole space business including media, sponsorships...and the X Prize Cup is an important part of that.

We are very proud of our partnership with New Mexico, Las Cruses and Governor Richardson. We're working to make the X Prize Cup an exciting annual event that will move the industry forward at the same time that it allows the public to personally participate in the future of the personal spaceflight revolution.

We went through a lengthy selection process ... narrowing it down to Florida and New Mexico. Both states provided us their best and final bid and they both offered very attractive opportunities.

The Rocket Racing League will inspire people of all ages to once again look up into the sky to find inspiration and excitement,

Prizes change the public perception about an issue. The more prize money, the more the issue is seen as important by the public.

Prizes add a really important mix to allow breakthroughs, because peer-reviewed research is typically focused on small, incremental advances.

Adventure travel is the fastest growing segment of the leisure travel business. And these X-Prize vehicles are basically the first step for future space-seeking adventure travelers,

Space for far too long has been something we just see on TV or read about, and not something that we can personally participate in. And that's what our goal is here, to make it something you can personally get involved in.

And that's what we need to do in the space world to get to that point. It's the cost of operations that makes the space shuttle cost three-quarters of a billion dollars per launch. Fuel is one percent of the cost. It's the operations that we have to work on.

And that's what we need to do in the space world to get to that point,

You're flying at an altitude that you wouldn't be able to use a parachute. The safest thing to do -- if there's a problem -- is to come back and land, just like a regular flight would.

This past fall, Zero-G was used in the premiere of season two of the TV show 'The Biggest Loser.' For this airing the producers created a competition where teams needed to gather colored plastic balls that were released and floated free. It was a very successful competition with great visuals.

This is where innovation begins. It's all part of the samemission, which is to make space personally accessible to the public.

It will be a couple of weeks about speed and excitement...technology and adventure for the whole family.

For me, it is a remembrance of sort of 'Star Wars' pod racing, ... Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace.

For me, it's sort of a remembrance of 'Star Wars' pod racing.

It's got to be participatory. It's about bringing 21st century racing into people's living rooms.

It's bringing 21st-century racing into people's personal living rooms. ... It's really the mix of NASCAR excitement and spaceflight.

These vehicles will literally sport a 20-foot bright brilliant flame out the back.

These teams with their different approaches show real out-of-the-box thinking. That's what the Ansari X Prize is doing...allowing people to innovate and learn how to operate a new class of vehicle.

These teams with their different approaches show real out-of-the-box thinking,

The New Mexico proposal was stronger, specifically on the strength of their financial bid. Governor Richardson is personally very excited about the whole space business and about building New Mexico into a central hub for public spaceflight.

In one sense, the X Prize has already succeeded. We've sparked a diverse set of vehicles that are being tested and built. Secondly, we've got people excited about this market place.

In my role as chairman of the X Prize, I had approached well over one hundred corporate chief executive officers regarding sponsorship. Few were able to grasp the importance of this new market...and those who were had great difficulty accepting the risks involved,

Clearly there is room for a number of locations for suborbital personal spaceflight. If all goes well, this will be a rising tide that lifts many spaceports, and for the first time enables a true commercial market.

If you stop and you think about everything we hold of value on this planet, metal, minerals, energy, real estate, the things that nations fight wars over. These things are in near infinite quantities out there.

You've got to choose your horse ahead of time. So, if you're interested in water technology, energy technology, you get to choose between the three or four companies that you have insight into. And you have to make a bet on them before they prove anything out.

In the space business, space had gotten very much to be the aerospace industry. This is something that governments only do and it's where the Boeings and the Lockheed's and the Northrop's and so forth. And there's no way these small companies could do it.

You should command and demand the tenfold leverage on your dollars when you give it away as well.

Today, philanthropy is a very unsophisticated, old world process where people who make a shitload of money go and give it away and when they're making their money, they're focused on 10x, 100x returns on the dollar.

I'm a nine-year old kid inside and my passion has been all my life to want to travel into space.

Space is not a two-year objective. It used to be, in the early '60's, we had this eye candy of Mercury and Gemini and Apollo and every year we would do something more and more and it met those needs. But the easy stuff has been done.

Go and try to start your own government in the United States today and you'll be squashed very quickly.

The thing about frontiers, it allows the individuals who are best, whether they're men or women or minorities or whatever, to step to the top. So in traditional societies, old world societies, in the United Kingdom if you would; if you were born into the right stratus, the right class, you had the ability to succeed.

You have to ask yourself the question, do you have the smartest people in the world working for your company? And if you do, you're lucky. But if you don't, put up the incentive. And have someone who is absolutely brilliant who's a 22-year old in India who says what about this way? And who revolutionizes the way you do business.

The question companies have to ask, or governments have to ask is, where do we allow crazy ideas to bubble up? Because if there is a failure, what happens? Someone gets blame. There's a lawsuit, there's a congressional investigation. And so, those things shut down the creative engine.

The price to generate a megawatt or a gigawatt of energy is coming down year after year. We're learning how to print it, make it more efficient.

The idea of a young thin woman who weighs 100 pounds driving herself around in a 4,000 pound SUV is laughable.

My goal is there's a new generation of cars. And people can say we're living in a new day and age. A new day and age of cars that are beautiful, affordable, safe, and of course every car gets over 100 mpg, why wouldn't it.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.

Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster. ... I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.

We have these 100 mms delays, you know, our attention is on our PDA, we're always in a rush. We drive around in these 4,000 pound metal wombs, these 4,000 pound containment systems to protect us from these 6,000 pound cars from smacking us.

Without risks, there can't be breakthroughs.

I have the general philosophy of creating the future you want to see.

I think people are dreaming big because they have the tools to dream big. I hope that people are dreaming big because it makes them feel good about their lives.

When cars have the sensory systems around them, GPS intelligence, they're looking at the world not only in visual spectrum, but infrared, ultraviolet and everything else that's going on and they've got reaction times in microseconds. Not a tenth of a second. They're a hundred thousand times faster.

In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn't have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five people showed up. It was the first thing I ever organized, and it took off!

Large companies and government agencies have a lot to protect and therefore are not willing to take big risks. A large company taking a risk can threaten its stock price. A government agency taking a risk can threaten congressional investigation.

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

You could not legally put a human and fly them into space. In fact, you couldn't bring a spaceship back. All those spaceships we were sending commercially into space were one way. You sort of like, got rid of them. And most passengers, who go up, do want to come back down.

You either disrupt your own company or someone else will.

The folks who go after grand challenges are impatient. They're pissed off. They're sick and tired, but in a passionate way. They're driven by a fire in their bellies to make a difference.

Many have built their careers buttressing the status quo, reinforcing what theyve already accomplished, and resisting the radical thinking that can topple their legacy - not exactly the attitude you want when trying to drive innovation forward.

I'm extraordinarily passionate about the idea of asteroid mining in the future. Asteroids out there, we know them from those that have fallen on the Earth, there is a class of asteroids, sub-class of nickel/iron asteroids, which are 50,000 times more enriched than Platinum mines on earth.

It's sad that the U.S. government doesn't fund risky research anymore.

We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy.

If you can make a big impact on the global literacy problem, you can uplift a big portion of society.

What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.

Research shows that the wealthier, more educated, and healthier a nation, the less violence and civil unrest among its populace, and the less likely that unrest will spread across its borders.

I get demoralized by organizations that start off with a mission and pull back when they find it's risky.

I don't think the space station is innovative. Going to the moon was innovative because we had no idea how to do it.

Mining asteroids will ultimately benefit humanity on and off the Earth in a multitude of ways.

Eight billion people will have Internet access by 2020.

My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.

My father, who grew up picking olives on the Greek island of Lesbos, was a doctor. So my family expected me to become a physician.

The quality of your life is a function of who you go through life with.

We are not going to stop here on planet Earth. We're going to move out to other planetary bodies.

Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday.

Technology is a resource liberating force!

By 2020 the U.S. will be short 91,000 doctors. There's no way we can educate enough doctors to make up that shortfall, and other countries are far worse off.

If you believe that the developing world deserves the same standards of living that we do in the developed world, then to achieve that, they need resources. They need the metals and the minerals to build the industries and the buildings and so forth, and the energy.

During the next 50 years, in countless cycles, in countless entrepreneurial companies, this let's just go and do it mentality will help us finally get off the planet and irreversibly open the space frontier. The capital and tools are finally being placed into the hands of those willing to risk, willing to fail, willing to follow the dreams.

What is grit? Grit is refusing to give up. It's persistence. It's making your own luck.

I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems - climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage - we surely do. [But] ultimately we knock them down.

NASA calls stuff nominal instead of phenomenal, like it really is. So I have given up that there is going to be a balance and NASA is going to do certain things and we are finally in a state of existence where small groups of individuals can do extraordinary things, funded by single people.

The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.

As lower-cost phones begin to penetrate, they'll become the educator and physician everywhere on the planet.

If you give people unlimited time and money, they'll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they'll either give up or try something new.

Today, a group of 20 individuals empowered by the exponential growing technologies of AI and robotics and computers and networks and eventually nanotechnology can do what only nation states could have done before.

When faced without a challenge, make one

Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity’s grandest challenge,

If the risk is fully aligned with your purpose and mission, then it's worth considering.

I believed that once we got to the Moon, there was no stopping us. But in fact, we did stop.

Stuff goes wrong. Expect it, learn from it, fix it. That's how remarkable happens.

Super-ambitious goals tend to be unifying and energizing to people; but only if they believe there's a chance of success.

You need to be a little crazy to change the world, and you can’t really fake it.

At its core, bitcoin is a smart currency, designed by very forward-thinking engineers. It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of credit card fees, currency exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transitions all good things

More than ever before in history, individuals can now band together to solve grand challenges. We face enormous problems, but we 'as individuals' have enormous power to solve them.