Rusty Schweickart Quotes

No government in the world today has explicitly assigned the responsibility for planetary protection to any of its agencies.

We're not passengers on Spaceship Earth. We're the crew.

When you look at the origins and evolution of life on Earth, it's been severely affected by asteroid impacts through history.

There's no accepted global policy on what to do about asteroid impacts.

As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startlingly aware how artificial are thousands of boundaries we've created to separate and define. And for the first time in your life you feel in your gut the precious unity of the Earth and all the living things it supports.

So I just let go with one hand, and just sort of swung around, looked at the Earth below and the black space above and the sun over my shoulder. And, I mean, it was this incredible, spectacular view.

It is fantastic to think that one day we may be able to access fuel, materials and even water in space instead of digging deeper and deeper into our planet for what we need and then dragging it all up into orbit, against Earth's gravity.

This whole issue of limits to growth, which provides a psychological, as well as a physical, cap on potential expansion of activity and awareness, has had a very depressing effect on many people ... I don't for a moment think that there's any concept which anyone's working with now which will be followed as a straightforward scenario. But the idea embodied in concepts such as space colonization or space industrialization, or availability of nonterrestrial resources, is fundamental, and it will change the way in which people look at the future.

When you have an asteroid threatening Earth, it's uncertain where it's going to hit until the last minute; the decision to take action has to be coordinated by the international community.

I don't want people to spend their nights worrying about getting hit by asteroids. But I do want them to encourage their political leaders to invest in the insurance, which will allow us to prevent it from happening.

We are going to learn how to relate to the Earth and our own natural environment here by looking seriously at space colony ecologies.

We got to the moon.

You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love.

You almost wish you could turn off the COMM and just appreciate the deafening quiet.

By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part.

Asteroids are deep-space bodies orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, and traveling to one would mean sending humans into solar orbit for the very first time. Facing those challenges of radiation, navigation and life support on a months-long trip millions of miles from home would be a perfect learning journey before a Mars trip.