More knowledge from another book
I was at the Air & Space Smithsonian shortly after having finished the book I had to read for my internship. I was roaming the book section of the gift shop and ran across a book that was on sale for just $5, called The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the near edge of infinity by Wyn Wachhorst. I haven't read much of it yet, but I've had a chance to get through the forward and preface, and begin on the 1st chapter (titled 'Kepler's Children'). SO i have a few quotations from this book that I thought I'd post.

"To gaze into the night sky and feel the vastness and passion of creation is to glimpse an equally vast interior. We are aware of the stars only because we have evolved a corresponding inner space."

"Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of the modern age."

"'Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether,' Kepler wrote to Galileo, 'and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare for the brave sky-travelers maps of the celestial bodies.'"

"What motivates those who venture over the edge, who trek over barren plains, through tangled jungle, or across the Arctic waste?... [it] is a sometimes selfless obsession with reaching the pristine edges of reality...the attempt to complete the grand internal model of reality, to broaden the context of meaning, to find the center by completing the edge."

"'It is part of the nature of man,' he adds, 'to start with romance and build to reality. We need this thing which makes us sit bolt upright when we are nine or ten and say, 'I want to go out and devour the world.''" (Ray Bradbury)

"'There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming at the stars' is a problem to occupy generations.... No matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.'" (Robert Goddard)

[It was] "Ed White, floating over the milky blue vastness of teh Pacific with that flash of sunlight on his viosr, that best captured the exhilaration, the euphoric liberation of a species come of age....'I don't want to come back, but I'm comin,' he said. 'It's the saddest moment of my life.'"

And as a side note... Books that Kepler Wrote
* Somnium - Kepler's vision of life on the moon
* Harmony of the World - Even through all the hardships Kepler faced during his life, he was convinced that it was still beautiful.

From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne

and thus ends the first chapter.