SCHOLAR ISLAND

"The very name "Space" seemed a blasphemous libel....he could not call it "dead".....Since out of this ocean the worlds and their life had come. He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds.....No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens."

C.S. Lewis

"A fiery chariot, borne on buoyant pinions,

sweeps near me now! The time has come for me

to pierce the ether's high, unknown dominions

to reach new spheres of pure activity!

This godlike rapture, this supreme existence,

can I , but now a worm, deserve and earn?

Yes, resolute to reach some brighter distance,

on earth's fair sun my back I turn!

So let me dare those gates to fling asunder

which every man would fain go slinking by!

'Tis time, through deeds the word of truth to thunder,

that in their courage men with the high gods may vie."

-Goethe, Faust: Part One,

"On August 16,1960 at 6:30 A.M. Joe Kittinger's helium balloon stopped rising. It reached 102,800 feet, and only weight of its payload prevented it from rising any higher.....

"They were in mufti (civilian clothes), but mufti or not, it was the Army....That was the beginning, The Versailles Treaty hadn't placed any restrictions on rockets, and the Army was desperate to get back on its feet. We didn't care much about that, one way or the other, but we needed money, and the Army seemed willing to help us. In 1932, the idea of war seemed to us an absurdity. The Nazis weren't yet in power. We felt no moral scruples about the possible future use of our brainchild. We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow could be milked most successfully."

-Werhner Von Braun

"From my earliest youth, I have despised the Greek proverb which claims that War is the father of Events. Nevertheless, my whole life has been one consecutive revelation of the core of truth which lies within that proverb....

   Do you believe that the thousands of scientists, engineers and craftsmen who labored for decades on rocket aircraft, guided missiles, and finally, on our great satellite vessels, envisaged in their loving work and ingenuity the diabolical ends to which their creations were often put? I tell you No, gentlemen! Those men were animated by secret visions of reaching into the heavens."

-General Braden in Wernher von Braun's "Mars Protect"

"This is the space age and we are here to go."

-William Burroughs

   "We shall bring to the comets not only trees but a great variety of other flora and fauna to create for ourselves an environment as beautiful as ever existed on Earth. Perhaps we shall teach our plants to make seeds which will sail out across the ocean of space to propagate life upon comets still unvisited by humans. Perhaps we shall start a wave of life which will spread from comet to comet without end until we have achieved the greening of the galaxy. That may be an end or a beginning, as Bernal said, but from here it is out of sight."

-Freeman Dyson

The Scientist as Rebel

"Behind a black wall of secrecy, the U.S. is climbing slowly toward a new level of warfare. In every U.S. factory, every technical institute, and every electronics laboratory, the military phrase of the day is "guided missiles."

-Jonathan Norton, Newsweek, 21 May 1951

"We should stop bewailing the fact that our beloved space travel idea is being pulled into the capacious maw of the military. It is certainly deplorable that the world is faced with a grave new crisis, but we should eventually realize that this is beyond our control. The old idea of human flight is still alive notwithstanding the fact that the airplane has been abused for destructive purposes

   You may say that my argumentation indicates a rather immoral opportunism. But I don't think it is. Weapons are not only something terrifying once a war is unleashed, but are also the most effective deterrents of war ever invented by man. They are certainly more efficient deterrents than that sort of goody-goody pacifism to which so many people in their desperation take refuge in these troubled days. Why, I just don't believe that Uncle Joe will realize some day he is wrong and become a Roman Catholic!"

-Wernher Von Braun

"Morning in the desert, when the impossible not only seems possible, but easy."

-Robert Goddard, Roswell, New Mexico, 1937

"Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading spacefaring nations...."

John F. Kennedy

   "Our mythology now is to be of infinite space and its light, which is without as well as within. Like moths, we are caught in the spell of its allure, flying to it outward, to the moon and beyond , and flying to it inward."

-Joseph Campbell

Myths To Live By

"....In the 1930s, rocketry was the domain of kooks, nuts, wackos, and science-fiction writers. JPL started out in the 1930s as the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GAl-CIT). When it was renamed by the army in 1945, however, it was not called the Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, despite the fact that its founders worked with rockets. The public would not have taken the word seriously."

-M.G. Lord

Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science

"In 1920, after U.S. rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard had published an article in a Smithsonian Institution publication that dealt with a hypothetical moon flight, he was painfully (and erroneously) mocked by the New York Times. Believing rockets would not work in a vacuum, it said Goddard "lacked the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." Decades of ridicule followed. Smarting from such slights, shortly before his death in 1945, Goddard wrote that the subject of rocketry must "be avoided in dignified scientific and engineering circles."

-C.P. Snow

Two Cultures

"Man must rise above the Earth-to the top of the atmosphere and beyond-for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives."

-Socrates

"A new mythology is possible in the Space Age, where we will again have heroes....as regards intention towards this Planet."

-William S. Burroughs

"Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from."
-Eric Hoffer  New York Times 21 July, 1969, on the first Moon Landing

"Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards."

Sir Fred Hoyle

"Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world."

Diane Ackerman, "A Natural History of the Senses"

   "The stars are our destiny. They are our legacy. Strewn like diamonds on a field of black velvet, they lie waiting for the hand of man to pluck them up. The gulf of space is like an infinite version of Ali Baba's cave, crammed with jewels and riches beyond counting"

                         Marshall T. Savage

                           The Millennial Project

"No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe."

-Henry Miller

Sunday After the War, "Reunion in Brooklyn"

"Through hyperspace, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time."

-Isaac Asimov,

The Foundation Trilogy

"Space travel...the total mobilization of the megamachine, commanding to the point of exhaustion all the resources of the state: It is both a symbol of total control and a means of popularizing it and extending it as an ineffable symbol of progress."

-Lewis Mumford

"Man has invented his doom

First step was touching the moon."

-Bob Dylan

"People walking on the moon

Smog will get you pretty soon."

-Jim Morrison

"I would have wished that after my return people had asked me how it was out there. How I coped with the glistening blackness of the world and how I felt being a star that circled the Earth."

Reinhard Furrer (Federal Republic of Germany)

"After several weeks it became difficult to remember clearly the fragrance of grass and trees, or warm summer rain, or powdery snow in a glade, or the faces of friends and loved ones that you now see only in dreams."

Pyotr Klimuk

"When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty."

-John Murir   1879

Travels In Alaska

"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread."

Blaise Pascal (1623-62)

"They cannot scare me with their empty space between stars,

On stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home to scare myself

With my own desert places."

-Robert Frost

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."

Robert A. Heinlein

"If man is Alpha and Omega, then it is profoundly important for religious reasons that we travel to other worlds, other galaxies; for it may be Man’s destiny to assure immortality, not only of his race but even of the spark of life itself….By the grace of God, we shall in this century successfully send man through space to the moon and to other planets on the first leg of his last and greatest journey…."

Werner Von Braun

"Etana looked down and saw the earth had become like a hill and the sea like a well. And so they flew for another hour, and once again Etana looked down: the earth was now like a grinding stone and the sea like a pot. After the third hour the earth was only a speck of dust, and the sea no longer seen."

Flight of Etana (written in Babylon 4,700 years ago)

"Transcendence is a wrong-headed concept. It means escape from the earth-bound and the repetitive, climbing above the everyday. It means putting men on the moon before feeding and housing the world’s poor."

Cynthia Cockburn

"The Earth is the cradle of the mind….Mankind will not remain on earth forever, but in its quest for light and space, will at first timidly penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and later in the search for heat and light will conquer for itself all the space near the sun."

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)

(father of Space flight)

"What is the destiny of man? What is the purpose of human life? If no one knows the answers to these questions now, can we ever hope to find them? We have searched for the answers on Earth for thousands of years without much success. Possibly we can find them out among the stars."

Donald W. Cox & James H. Chestek

Doomsday Asteroid

"In short, if humanity wants to either progress or survive, we have to become a space faring species."

Dr. Robert Zubrin

"The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God."

James Irwin (USA)

"one morning I woke up and decided to look out the window, to see where we were. We were flying over America and suddenly I saw snow, the first snow, we ever saw from orbit. Light and powdery, it blended with the contours of the land, with the veins of the rivers. I thought-autumn, snow-people are busy getting ready for winter. A few minutes later we were flying over the Atlantic, then Europe, and then Russia. I have never visited America, but I imagined that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same there as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same. And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what the country you look at. We are all Earth’s children, and we should treat her as our Mother."

Aleksandr Aleksandrov

"When men have gone down the longest rivers, climbed the highest mountains, and crossed the greatest deserts there will still be the stars….

Louis L’Amour

A Trail of Memories

"The murky views which some scientists advocate as to the inevitable end of every living thing on Earth…should not now be regarded as axiomatic. The finer parts of mankind will, in all likelihood, never perish-they will migrate from sun to sun as they go out. And so there is no end to life, to intellect and the perfection of humanity. Its progress is everlasting."

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky

"So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can’t even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars, and, Vroom! There he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky."

Russell Baker

(N.Y. Times July 21,1969)

EARTHRISE:seen for the first time by human eyes, December 24, 1968, as Apollo 8 , orbiting clockwise, emerged from behind the moon. The photograph was taken before the astronauts could reload with color film, which, a few minutes later, captured the more famous "Earthrise" image, generally shown rotated 90 degrees

Book: "Earthrise: How Man First Saw The Earth" by Robert Poole  "This book is about that extraordinary moment in 1968 when humankind first saw the whole Earth, and about everything that flowed into and out of it. It is an alternative history of the space age, written from a viewpoint looking back at the Earth. Confidence in the progress of science and technology was never higher than at the time of the first journeys to the Moon; afterwards came the first 'Earth Day,' the crisis of confidence, and the environmentalist renaissance. at the very apex of human progress the question was asked, 'Where next?" and the ansswer came, "Home." earthrise was an epiphany in space."

"Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and the splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known."

Vladimir Nabakov

(N.Y. Times, July 21,1969)

"Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty-but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That’s where life is; that’s where all the good stuff is."

Loren Acton (USA)

"What struck me most was the silence. It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible. There were more stars in the sky than I had expected. The sky was deep black, yet at the same time bright with sunlight.

The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from Space."

Aleksei Leonov (USSR)

The Earth at night looks even more magical than it does during the day. There is always a storm happening somewhere. Flashes of lightning sometimes cover up to a fourth of a continent. At first you see this as a natural disturbance, the eruption of splashes as a majestic spectacle. Aboard the spacecraft it’s quiet. The peals of thunder cannot be heard, the gusts of win cannot be felt, and it seems as if everything is calm, simply a play of light. All of s sudden , against your will, you imagine that the lightning comes not from a natural storm, but from the explosions of bombs. No. This must never occur. Let only the northern lights and lightning blaze above our precious Earth."

Vladimir Shatalov

"We agree with you, and I know the astronauts do too, that the Apollo mission could not have succeeded without the help of God…I believe that you can be reassured that those who work in the space program are indeed aware of the presence of the Creator and are not neglectful of spiritual values."

O.B. Lloyd (NASA official spokesman)

"Already ambition is stirring in men to conquer space as they conquered air, and this ambition…..as time goes on becomes more and more reinforced by necessity."

J.D. Bernal

An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul

"Should we withdraw in fear from the next step, should we substitute temporary material welfare for spiritual adventure….Then will Man fall back from his destiny, the mighty surge of his achievement will be lost, and the confines of this planet will destroy him."

George Mueller

"My first view-a panorama of brilliant deep blue ocean, shot with shades of green and gray and white-was of atolls and clouds. Close to the window I could see that this Pacific scene in motion was rimmed by the great curved limb of the Earth. It had a thin halo of blue held close, and beyond black space. I held my breath, but something was missing-I felt strangely unfulfilled. Here was a tremendous visual spectacle, but viewed in silence. There was no grand musical accompaniment: no triumphant, inspired sonata or symphony. Each one of us must write the music of this sphere for ourselves."

Charles Walker (USA)

"Put three grains of sand inside a vast Cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars."

James Jeans

"Our race will spread out through space-unlimited room, unlimited energy, unlimited wealth. This is certain."

-Robert A. Heinlein

"I'm not that interested in space"

-John F. Kennedy (what he supposedly told NASA officials in 1962)

"We took the human intellect and the human vision, the human mind 240,000 miles away from its home base.....Whether we found a rock there or not was of no importance."

-Astronaut Frank Borman

"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what scope for misery and folly. If they not be inhabited, what a waste of space."

-Thomas Carlyle

"A mere 25 years from guided missile to man on the moon, and then....nothing."

-Craig Nelson

Rocket men: The Epic story of the First men on the Moon

As high-tech communications gadgets proliferate on Earth, the satellites enabling them to work proliferate above. Increasingly, communication systems call for whole constellations of satellites, orbiting at about the same altitude, to provide global coverage. One constellation, the Iridium system, with 66 spacecraft, is now in place, and more are planned.

All those satellites, however, have to share near-Earth space with lots of junk-10,000 pieces of debris four to eight inches across or larger; 100,000 pieces bigger than about half an inch. Because all that debris is traveling at thousands of miles an hour, the possibility of a collision sever enough to destroy a satellite is a real one. Just how real has been revealed by Italian scientists, who analyzed the risk for a constellation of satellites like Iridiums.

Writing in Nature, they concluded that there was a 10 percent chance per decade that a satellite in a typical constellation would have a catastrophic collision. That is bad enough. But worse is what could happen next.

Because of the nature of the orbits in a satellite constellation, the debris from one collision (which itself could create thousands more pieces of junk) would increase the chances of another collision with a satellite in the constellation, to 10 percent over five years. The eventual result could be a chain of collisions that may irreversibly pollute a portion of near-Earth space much faster than previously thought, perhaps over a century, rather than 300 to 500 years.

                                 *************

"Weightlessness comes on abruptly. I soared as if I were inside a soap bubble. Like an infant in the womb of my Spacecraft, still a child of my Mother Earth."

Miroslav Hermaszewski (Poland)

   "It is impossible to accede to a fundamentally new environment without experiencing the inner terrors of a metamorphosis. The child is terrified when it opens its eyes for the first time. Similarly, for our mind to adjust itself to lines and horizons enlarged beyond measure, it must renounce the comfort of familiar narrowness. It must create a new equilibrium for everything that had formerly been so neatly arranged in its small inner world. It is dazzled when it emerges from its dark prison, awed to find itself suddenly at the top of a tower, and it suffers from giddiness and disorientation. The whole psychology of modern disquiet is linked with the sudden confrontation with space-time."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man

"Our vision calls for prompt global strike space systems with the capability to directly apply force from or through space against terrestrial targets."

-Air Force Space Command, Strategic Master Plan, Federal Year 2004 and Beyond

"Space offers attractive options not only for missile defense but for a broad range of interrelated civil and military missions. It truly is the ultimate high ground. we are exploring concepts and technologies for space-based intercepts."

-Paul Wolfowitz  deputy secretary of defense, Oct 2002

   "The fleck of paint that cratered the Challenger's windshield in 1983 was a harbinger of things to come. Today, between one and three $80,000 Shuttle windows and a large number of heat-shielding tiles are replaced after each flight. Debris impact management is a major factor in space station design and operation. 

   Fortunately, space junk damage has so far been limited to monetary losses, but surely the day will come when a space-walking astronaut is stuck and killed by one of these buzzing bees (remember that even a small washer has the impact energy of a cannonball at orbital velocities).

   Objects in orbits higher than 700 kilometers will remain there more than 1,000 years. If debris growth continues unchecked, before the end of this century the density of debris objects will reach critical mass-debris will beget more debris by mutual impacts. If that happens, we will have effectively walled ourselves in with a shell of debris around Earth that no spacecraft, manned or unmanned, civilian or military, can safely penetrate. And the space age will be over."*

Ray Eriksson, Principal Engineer 

The Flight Materials Group Wakefield Mass.

Forbes Mag

* This was before China exploded  a satellite making matters much worse

"China either didn't know or didn't care that its test of a satellite killer would produce a spray of space debris. Either way, it's worrisome for the future use of space.

   Another question is why China even bothered. Any country capable of launching a satellite-and China has 39 in orbit,-can easily destroy one with a kinetic weapon that basically just smashes into its target.

   And China did just that, smashing one of its old weather satellites into smithereens and producing somewhere from 800 to 1,000 pieces of debris. "At either number, it is the worst such episode in space history," according to New York Times science writer William Broad. "The debris field quickly encircled Earth and now, Broad writes, more than half the spacecraft in orbit pass through it.

   In the 50 years since Sputnik was launched, man's ventures into space have left an epic amount of trash behind that produces even more trash when the dead satellites, fuel tanks roaming stages collide with each other, as they often do. In other words, the problem will continue to proliferate even if we stop adding to it. And the enormous relative speeds make even small bits of debris potentially lethal to a satellite or spaceship.

   There are around 11,000 chunks of space debris larger than 4 inches whipping around the planet, plus countless smaller pieces, and as yet there is no practical way of removing them. Meanwhile, earthly technology is increasingly dependent on space and satellites for communications, navigation, environmental monitoring, research and spying.

   Guidelines to control space junk already exist, among the major users of space-the United States, Russia, Japan, the European Space Agency. By happenstance, China is hosting a conference on the problem of proliferating debris in April, and that should be an occasion to enlist Beijing in the cause."

Editorial Rocky Mountain News

"Whoever has the capability to control space will likewise possess the capability to exert control of the surface of the Earth."

-General Thomas D. White U.S. air force chief of staff, Nov 29, 1957

"Weaponization of space would make the debris problem much worse, and even one war in space could encase the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would thereafter make space near the Earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes....Every person who cares about the human future in space should also realize that weaponizing space will jeopardize the possibility of space exploration."

Joel Primack, (Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz)

...."The guiding spirit behind this belligerence was Donald Rumsfeld, who chaired a commission set up by Congress in 1999 to assess America's vulnerability in space. He resigned in December 2000, when President Bush picked him as defense secretary; two weeks later, the commission released its findings.

   The report warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" and urged the United States to "develop and deploy the means to deter and defend against hostile acts directed at U.S. space assets." It noted that international law did not prohibit "placing or using weapons in space." In 2006, true to Rumsfeld's vision, the administration's new National Space Policy emphasized a U.S. right to preserve, "capabilities and freedom of action in space," and to "deny such freedom of action to adversaries"-we do what we want, and the rest of the world does what we say."

See article Atlantic September 2008 by Guy Gugliotta

   "Jiuquan is a space center-one of China's three most important launch pads for satellites, buried deep on the flat, sunny fringes of the Gobi Desert. It was first occupied in 1958-just thirteen years after Needham passed by.

   In those ultrasecret times this was the site of the first tests of surface-to-surface missiles for the strategic artillery divisions of the People's Liberation Army. The first nuclear-capable missile was sent sent into the stratosphere from Jiuquan in 1966. These days the pad, far out of sight of the road, launches satellites commercially, claiming a 100 percent success rate. In October 2003 the people of Jiuquan sent Yang Lingwei, the first Chinese astronaut, into space, and helped make him a national hero. For the first half century of its life Jiuquan was off-limits to all except its employees and party patrons; now, since Yang's fourteen successful orbits, the town and the launch center have been opened to tourists. But these tourists are Chinese nationals only, No foreigners may come. Not yet."

   Joseph Needham would have wished to spend time at Jiuquan-if for no other reason than to see the sign that rises on a giant billboard at the entrance to the town. It is written in huge scarlet characters, and in enormous letters, in both Chinese and English. it proclaims a sentiment to which Needham readily subscribed , from the moment in 1948 when he first began writing his book, perhaps even from when he first went to China in 1943, perhaps from when he first met Lu Gwei-djen, and she introduced him to her language, in 1937.

The sign, simply and starkly, states: "Without Haste. Without Fear. We Conquer the World."

-Simon Winchester

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist who Unlocked The Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

"The sons of a U.S. astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut have linked up in space. Computer game developer Richard Garriott, whose father is former Skylab scientist Owen Garriott, paid $35 million to blast off this week in a Russian Soyuz capsule. Waiting for him at the International Space Station was cosmonaut Sergi Volkov, whose father, Alexander, was aboard the space station when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. When they met, Gariott and Volkov embraced as their fathers watched from Russia's Mission Control. "I'm very happy that we have formed a real space dynasty." said the elder Volkow."

The Week Oct 24,2008

   "Johnson told the cookout gathering he had a piece of news that once more put the United States ahead.

   "We've spent thirty-five, more likely forty billion dollars, on what I'm gonna tell you. What our scientists have done is worth ten times that. We now know where the Soviets have their missiles and launching sites. We've seen their faces as they wait to push the button on key sites. We know where the North Koreans have their radar installations and looked inside their buildings unaware we are looking at them. We know where the terrorist camps are in Libya and Syria and we've seen the make of their Russian weapons. We know all this because of something special."

   Johnson paused looking into their faces, the consummate actor who had held the attention of millions while on the campaign trail. Then, spearing a slice of meat, he waved it skyward.

   "What we have is real-time space photography! We are back in front."

   Even if some of his listeners did not fully understand what he meant by "real-time space photography," they still clapped. America was back in front. That was all that really mattered."

-Gordon Thomas

Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence: Inside MI5 and MI6

"We know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were building things we didn't need to build"

Lyndon Johnson (after project Gemini)

"Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny"

-General Lance Lord (head of the Air Force Space Command

"We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space, but we are thinking about the possibilities"

Pete Teets (Secretary of the air force)

"the single dumbest thing I have heard so far from this administration....it would be a disaster for us to put weapons in space of any kind under any circumstances. It only invites other countries to do the same thing."

-Tom Daschle

"No other nation on earth is going to accept the U.S. developing something they see as the death star. It's not going to happen. People are going to find ways to target it, and it's going to create a huge problem."

-Theresa Hitchens, May ,2005

"If the United States thought it was going to be "a space superpower, it is not going to be alone....It will have company."

-Dr. Yao Ynzhu of the Chinese Army's Academy of Military Science

"in 1980, only 10 countries were operating satellites in space. Today, nine countries operate spaceports, more than 50 countries own or have partial ownership in satellites, and citizens of 39 nations have traveled in space. In 1980, we were tracking approximately 4,700 objects in space; 280 of those objects were active payloads/space-craft, while another 2,600 were debris. Today, we are tracking approximately 19,900 objects-1,300 to 1,500 over the next 10 years. We also estimate the overall number of tracked objects could increase from 19m,000 to as much as 100,000"

-Air Force Lt. Gen. Larry D. James, Joint Functional Commander for Space, US strategic Command House Science and Technology committee

   "Robo-One, a robot combat event held in Japan every year, may provide a taste of what's to come. The competition organizers have announced plans for a new division in 2010: robot combat in space. A small satellite carrying humanoid robots will be blasted into the heavens. "Once safely in orbit, the satellite will release its robotic passengers, who will proceed to fight each other in the vacuum of space."

   If that does not signify human progress, what does?"

-P.W. Singer

Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

                           ***********************

Book: "Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the birth of the Space Age" by David A Clary

Book: "Sky As Frontier" by David T. Courtwright

Book: "Shooting For The Moon: The Strange History of Human Spaceflight" by Bob Berman

Book: "SpaceFlight: The Complete Story from Sputnik to Shuttle-And Beyond" by Giles Sparrow

Book: "Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond" by Marina Benjamin

Book: "Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons" by John Carter

Book: "Sputnik: The Shock of the Century" by Paul Dickson

Book: "Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990" by Linda Hunt

Book: "The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era" by Michael J. Neufeld

Book: "Voyage to the Milky Way: The Future of Space Exploration" By Donald Goldsmith

Book: Who’s Who in Space: The International Space Year Edition. by Michael Cassutt

Book: The Japanese and Indian Space Programmes: Two Roads into Space…by B. Harvey

Book: The Home Planet….ed Kevin W. Kelley (for the Association of Space Explorers)

Book: The Case for Mars. .by Robert Zubrin

Book: The Millennial Project. .by Marshall T. Savage

Book: "The Heavens and Earth: A political History of the Space Age." by 

Walter A. McDougall

Book: "Space Odyssey" by William Harwood

Book: "The Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship" by George Dyson

Book: "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" by Carl Sagan

Book: "Leaving Earth" by Robert Zimmerman

Book: "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions" by Richard Dale and Bill Howard

Book: "Journeys to the Ends of the Universe: A guided Tour of the Beginnings and Endings of Planets, Stars, Galaxies and the Universe." by C.R. Kitchin

Book: "NASA & The Exploration of Space: With Works from the NASA Art Collection" by R.D. Launius & B. Ulrich

Book: "Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space" by Bettyann Holtzmann Keves

Book: "Earth From Above, Revised Edition" by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Book: "Von Braun: Dreamer Of Space/Engineer of War" by Michael J. Neufeld

Book: "Dark Side Of The Moon: Wernher von Braun, The Third Reich, and the Space Race" by Wayne Biddle

Book: "Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe" by Mark Volt

Book: "The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology, and Politics" by Robert W. Smith

Book: "Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics" by Max Jammer

Book: "Lost In Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of A New Space Age" by Greg Klerlx

Book: "Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age" by Richard C. Cook

Book: "Life Beyond Earth" by Timothy Ferris

Book: "Centauri Dreams" by Paul Gilster

Book: "Full Moon" by Michael Light

Book: "Earthrise: How Man First Saw The Earth" by Robert Poole

Book: "Planet Earth" by Stefan Dech et al.

Book: "Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes" by Michael BEnson

Book: "Rose Center for Earth and Space: A Museum for the Twenty-First Century"

Book: "A History of Space Exploration" by Tim Furniss

Book: "Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age" by Richard C. Cook

Book: "National Geographic Encyclopedia of Space" by Linda K. Glover et al.

Book: "T-Minus: The Race to the Moon" by Jim Ottaviani

Book: "One Small Step: Celebrating the first men on the Moon" by Jerry Stone

Book: "Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who dared to dream" by Tanya Lee Stone

Book: "Voices From the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences" by Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl

Book: "High-Speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation" by Erik M.conway