Ellen Stofan Quotes
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I always like to say just think you were a doctor with only one patient. You might understand how that person gets sick, how they get better, but you understand nothing about the progression of disease or how humans in general get ill. Now take an Earth scientist: you only have one planet to study.
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Being able to have a laboratory on Mars, being able to have some sort of sustained human presence on Mars in the future, I think, is critically important for science.
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As chief scientist, it's sort of my job to look at bridges between what we do and to see the connections. But when we try to understand how are planets around other stars habitable... to looking back at the Earth - how are the changes that are taking place, how are they going to affect humanity?
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Humans can actually read a landscape, go through a lot of rocks - crack them open, throw them, pick up the next one. Rovers are great - they do amazing science - but it is a lot more tedious process; they go much less far than a human can cover in a day.
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If I had an unlimited budget, I would really be probing that question of life because we know what the questions are, and we know what the destinations are.
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So many people I talk to who work in technology, you ask them, 'What got you interested in science?' and those from my generation say, 'The Apollo landings.'
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As a card-carrying space nerd and NASA's chief scientist, I love space movies, from 'Star Trek' to 'Star Wars' to my all-time favorite - 'The Dish', an Australian comedy that celebrates that first moment when Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of our moon.
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I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.
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Instead of being able to look at smaller interesting research projects, I am trying to see the links between all the research NASA does. For me, that's extremely fun because I get to go play and learn about areas of science that I know nothing about.
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To avoid congestion, I get up at 5:10, grab a slice of raisin toast, and leave the house at 6 A.M. My husband, Tim Dunn, who works for an environmental agency, is still asleep when I slip out, and I find that rather annoying.
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We have to ask, 'How can we break a huge challenge like sending humans to Mars into a series of doable, affordable steps? How can we break that problem down into chunks in order to keep making progress?'
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I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life.
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I wish someone would redo 'Dune.'
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You see countries like India really investing in their space program because they see it as inspirational and good for their economy.
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As we visit Mars multiple times, we will build up infrastructure on the surface to expand the capabilities and reach of humans on Mars.
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People see space as a place where you go and cooperate.
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To unambiguously settle the questions of whether there was life on Mars, it will take scientists down on the surface.
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Mars was this water-based planet, and we know there was stable water on the surface for a long time, which is critical for life having a chance to develop.
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My key aim is to get man on the surface of Mars by the mid-2030s.
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It's part of the human character to want to know what's over the next hill, to want to know what's beyond.
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We like to talk about pioneering Mars rather than just exploring Mars, because once we get to Mars, we will set up some sort of permanent presence.
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We're going to understand that there is life on other bodies in the solar system.
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Everybody has busy lives, but you can tell people, 'Go outside and look at the night sky. We've been able to demonstrate that every star you see probably has a planet around it.'
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I grew up in this business... A lot of my life has been centered around this question about how NASA is helping us to understand our own home planet... and to understand our place in the universe.