“Future historians will give a few paragraphs to the Saturn rockets that took us to the Moon, the shuttle that conquered Low Earth Orbit, and the aerospace plane, but they are likely to spend much more time looking at the underlying principles on which their own civilization was founded. They will know that physical technologies are the vessels for the exploration that takes place in human societies, but are not the essence of the transformations that they engender.”
Frank White, from The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 161.
