Robert Zubrin Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.