I have two neat little pieces of fiction on deck, but I haven’t finished either one yet. Busy with the girls and all, this time an afternoon at the park and just so much house business to take care of. But let me leave you with a superb quote I came across in Robert Zubrin’s book Entering Space. I haven’t really read the book yet; I was just thumbing through it while on my exercise bike yesterday morning.
German physicist Hermann Oberth (1894-1989) is considered a founding father of the science of rocketry (along with American Robert Goddard and Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky). Along with Werner von Braun he worked on the V2 rocket for Germany in World War II, and, like von Braun, came to America in the 60s to work on the American space program.
Anyway, here’s what he wrote in 1957 concerning the development of space technology:
And what would be the purpose of all this? For those who have never known the relentless urge to explore and discover, there is no answer. For those who have felt this urge, the answer is self-evident. For the latter there is no solution but to investigate every possible means of gaining knowledge of the universe.
This then is the goal: To make available for life every place where life is possible. To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabited, and all life purposeful.
That just very well might be the second-largest, second-greatest dream I have ever heard or read …
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