Robert Zubrin Quotations

What they're really developing is equipment to do a rational space station and a Moon programme later,

if someone comes in (as US president in 2009) and has no interest, he can just say, 'thank you for rationalising the space station' and leave it at that.

It has as many similarities to Mars as you are likely to find anywhere on Earth.

Mars coming this close is an excellent opportunity for amateur astronomers to see Mars, ... With a good amateur telescope right now, you can easily see the ice cap on the Martian pole.

We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later. Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade.

The testing of life support systems will certainly be useful, ... But on the psychological side, the real human factor is not whether people go crazy living in a tin: they don't. It's whether they can put up with the overwork once they arrive on Mars and start a rigorous programme of field exploration.

The thing that makes this a winner is 1) there is a negligible cost difference to making flex fuel vehicle, 2) such cars can use existing gasoline.

This is the first time that anyone has done experiments on higher life in martian-like environment,

This is really groundbreaking research, ... There has been almost no research on artificial gravity in space and none concerning martian gravity.

They have an inferior lunar mission mode per sebut if they make the heavy-lift vehicle, they make everything we need them to make. That's the most important thing the lunar program can give the Mars program.

It's an important science study that has not been done by a NASA center. Before we can send people on a mission with artificial gravity, it's important to find out the effects,

This is incredibly exciting. What this means is that we have a chance to find ... extant life.

the first rational plan in any sense that I've seen from Nasa in decades.

Unless people can see broad vistas of unused resources in front of them, the belief in limited resources tends to follow as a matter of course. And if the idea is accepted that the world's resources are fixed, then each person is ultimately the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The extreme result is tyranny, war and even genocide. Only in a universe of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.

I would say that failure to terraform Mars constitutes failure to live up to our human nature and a betrayal of our responsibility as members of the community of life itself

The White Mars [project] is a bold move that will add significantly to our understanding of how to deal with the challenge of human exploration of the Red Planet.

Today the human race is a single twig on the tree of life, a single species on a single planet. Our condition can thus only be described as extremely fragile, endangered by forces of nature currently beyond our control, our own mistakes, and other branches of the wildly blossoming tree itself. Looked at this way, we can then pose the question of the future of humanity on Earth, in the solar system, and in the galaxy from the standpoint of both evolutionary biology and human nature. The conclusion is straightforward: Our choice is to grow, branch, spread and develop, or stagnate and die.