Orbital Quotes & Sayings

In awe, I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebony void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang, for ever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this I thought ... I must put a roof on this toilet. — Les Dawson

Japan Air's orbital terminus was a white toroid studded with domes and ringed with the dark-rimmed oval openings of docking bays. — William Gibson

The key virtue of orbital assembly is that it eliminates the tight connection between the size of the expedition and the size of the rockets used to launch it. — Henry Spencer

No! Please! I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled.
"Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?"
"What?"
"Oh, you'd like something simpler? — Terry Pratchett

With the geosynchronous orbit, the RAE Table maxes out. It has two answers for the orbital lifetime of a spacecraft in GSO: "greater than a million years" and "indefinite. — Trevor Paglen

I was sat at the bottom of the garden a week ago, smoking a reflective cheroot, thinking about this and that - mostly that, and I just happened to glance at the night sky and I marvelled at the millions of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver thrown carelessly onto black velvet. In awe I watched the waxen moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an amber chariot towards the void of infinite space wherein the tethered bolts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever in their orbital majesty; and as I looked at all this, I thought, 'I must put a roof on this lavatory. — Les Dawson

And then, suddenly, calm: we reach Mach 25, orbital speed, the engines wind down, and I notice little motes of dust floating lazily upward. Upward. Experimentally, I let go of my checklist for a few seconds and watch it hover, then drift off serenely, instead of thumping to the ground. I feel like a little kid, like a sorcerer, like the luckiest person alive. I am in space, weightless, and getting here only took 8 minutes and 42 seconds. Give or take a few thousand days of training. — Chris Hadfield

(One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn's, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.) — Arthur C. Clarke

What's the orbital velocity of the moon? — Terry Pratchett

Your co-orbital anti-satellite weapon is designed to destroy satellites. Furthermore, the Soviet Union began research in defenses utilizing directed energy before the United States did and seems well along in research (and incidentally, some testing outside laboratories) of lasers and other forms of directed energy. I do not point this out in reproach or suggest these activities are in violation of agreements, but if we were to follow your logic to the effect that what you call space-strike weapons would only be developed by a country planning a first strike, what would we think? — Ronald Reagan

The green appeal of solar sailing - traveling by light, once chemical propellants have done their dirty job of orbital insertion - ought to be powerful. — Thomas Mallon

The beautiful Antonia is a thing of the past. The damage she suffered was superficially catastrophic. Left orbital bone pulverized. Nose flattened, crushed so brutally they had to pull it out of her nasal cavity with forceps. Mouth so swollen it makes a hissing sound as air goes between her shattered front teeth. Whiplash and severe concussion. The ship doctors thought she was in a ship crash until they found the imprint of House Jupiter's lightning crest in several places on her face. — Pierce Brown

only reason that the three of them were there, that Molly was there, instead of just him and his mom, was because of the space station. Jack wondered how many people could have been saved if they'd invested in a colony on the moon, or even Mars. Hell, even a proper orbital station would have been better than this. He — Anya Merchant

More of the planet was unfolding beneath them as the Heart of Gold streaked along its orbital path. The suns now stood high in the black sky, the pyrotechnics of dawn were over, and the surface of the planet appeared bleak and forbidding in the common light of day - gray dusty and only dimly contoured. It looked dead and cold as a crypt. From time to time promising features would appear on the distant horizon - ravines, maybe mountains, maybe even cities - but as they approached the lines would soften and blur into anonymity and nothing would transpire. The planet's surface was blurred by time, by the slow movement of the thin stagnant air that had crept across it for century upon century. — Douglas Adams

I am convinced that the modular structure of the Mir will be the main trend in manned orbital stations development in the next century. — Valentina Tereshkova

Circling the earth in the orbital spaceship I marvelled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world!! Let us safeguard and enhance this beauty-not destroy it — Yuri Gagarin

Our house was a collection of silences, each room a mute, empty frame, each of us three oscillating bodies (Mom, Dad, me) moving around in our own curved functions, from space to space, not making any noise, just waiting, waiting to wait, trying, for some reason, not to disrupt the field of silence, not to perturb the delicate equilibrium of the system. We wandered from room to room, just missing one another, on paths neither chosen by us nor random, but determined by our own particular characteristics, our own properties, unable to deviate, to break from our orbital loops, unable to do something as simple as walking into the next room where our beloved, our father, our mother, our child, our wife, our husband, was sitting, silent, waiting but not realizing it, waiting for someone to say something, anything, wanting to do it, yearning to do it, physically unable to bring ourselves to change our velocities. — Charles Yu

And from, you know, small ideas, bigger ideas emerge. So we're starting with suborbital space flights and we'll then go into orbital space flights and, you know, maybe one day we'll send people on a one-way voyage into the depths of space as per the science fiction trips. — Richard Branson

Look up, greet sparks of fire with salted eyes,
For he's a burning atmospheric sigh:
One blaze of liquid flame on midnight sky,
Soft orbital decay, and last goodbye. — Alan James Roll

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart. — Ben Aaronovitch

I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings. — Austin Grossman

Scientists constantly get clobbered with the idea that we spent 27 billion dollars on the Apollo programs, and are asked "What more do you want?" We didn't spend it; it was done for political reasons ... Apollo was a response to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and to the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin. President Kennedy's objective was not to find out the origin of the moon by the end of the decade; rather it was to put a man on the moon and bring him back, and we did that. — Carl Sagan

Compared to the brains of normal controls, the brains of our OCD volunteers showed hypermetabolic activity in the orbital frontal cortex, which is tucked into the underside of the front of the brain above and behind the eyes (hence its name) as shown in Figure 1 on page 63. The scans showed, too, a trend toward hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Geological age plays the same part in our views of the duration of the universe as the Earth's orbital radius does in our views of the immensity of space. — John Joly

Earth's orbital grid was a mish-mash of new and old systems, not even a tenth as deadly as it should be due to political considerations that, until very recently, seemed so incredibly important. — Evan Currie

The frontier orbital approach was further developed in various directions by my own group and many other scientists, both theoretical and experimental. — Kenichi Fukui

No matter how competent or how seasoned, every astronaut is essentially a perpetual student, forever cramming for the next test. It's not how I envisioned things when I was 9 years old. Then I dreamed of blasting off in a blaze of glory to explore the universe, not sitting in a classroom studying orbital mechanics. In Russian. — Chris Hadfield

Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury's orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton's mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury's trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations. — Brian Greene

Back in the NBA's pre-mask era, ballers with busted noses or orbital bones had two unappealing options: Sit out and heal, or strap on a Michael Myers-looking opaque face shield closely related to that worn by hockey goalies. — Brendan I. Koerner

Anyone who made it through the screening and the training required to become an Arkie" - which doesn't include you, Julia - "will understand exactly what we are trying to do from an orbital mechanics standpoint. — Neal Stephenson

This space station [Yang Liwei] was little more than a giant Orbital Denial Station. If those charges were to detonate, the debris ... any future space launch would be grounded for years. It was a "Scorched Space" policy. "If we can't have it, neither can anyone else. — Max Brooks

Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool. — William Gibson

Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A. — Neil Gaiman

all the time complaining at me that she could have had a career dancing topless at the Orbital Grill and Rendezvous Parlor. Her and her perky breasts. Yasmin, I told her, all the girls have perky breasts in zero-g, you were nothing special, you're lucky a good man took you away from all that. — Anne McCaffrey

Dear Dr. Ortiz - Congratulations on your discovery! We found the object, too, about six months ago and have been studying it in detail for the past few months. It has a few interesting properties that you might find interesting. Most interestingly, it has a satellite, and the orbital solution gives a system mass of about 28% of that of the Pluto-Charon system. It's still probably the biggest KBO around but it has a sufficiently high albedo that it is not quite as big or massive as Pluto. I've got a paper describing the satellite that, ironically, I was planning to submit tomorrow. I will forward the paper to you as I submit it. I am sure that I will get inquiries about your new object from different people; is there [or is there going to be] a website describing your survey or your discovery that I can point people to? Again, congratulations on a very nice discovery! — Mike Brown

The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire. — James S.A. Corey

This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other "wholes," or because the "whole" made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden. — Cesar Aira

The Grace Hotel in Sukhumvit had been a magnet for tarts, double-bent cops, single-trippers, sub-orbital space cadets and those spring-necked noddies who spent their waking hours peering into the dark side of the spoon. — David McMillan

I study orbital dynamics as a hobby. My idea of a good time is sitting down and drawing on that knowledge to imagine a space mission from beginning to end, getting as many details right as I can. — Andy Weir

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world's destruction. — Iain M. Banks

To get to Earth from the edge of the solar system, depending on the time of year and the position of the planets, you need to pass through at least Poland, Prussia, and Turkey, and you'd probably get stamps in your passport from a few of the other great powers. Then as you get closer to the world, you arrive at a point, in the continually shifting carriage space over the countries, where this complexity has to give way or fail. And so you arrive in the blissful lubrication of neutral orbital territory. — Paul Cornell

Did you know, the man who invented the atomic bomb once said that keeping peace through deterrence was like keeping two scorpions in one bottle? You can picture that, right? They know they can't sting without getting stung. They can't kill without getting killed. And you'd think that would stop them." He gave the book another boot, and it flipped closed with a snick. "But it doesn't." He looked up and his eyes were the color of Cherenkov radiation, the color of an orbital weapon. "You've got a bit of nerve, little scorpion. All I did was invent the bottle. — Erin Bow

In manned Earth orbital flights, still other problems arise. Consider a religious Muslim or Jew circling the Earth once every ninety minutes. Is he obligated to celebrate the Sabbath every seventh orbit? Spaceflight provides access to environments very different from those in which we and our customs have grown up. — Carl Sagan

A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences. — Jean Baudrillard

You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull." Sherlock — Arthur Conan Doyle

i will forever be colliding
with a billion unnamed
undiscovered stars, each of us
on our own orbital paths. — Sanober Khan

It was orbital, it was mag, it was beyond the ult. — J.D. Robb