We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

The line contrasts two kinds of difficulty in large technological enterprises: the solvable, physical challenge of spaceflight (“lick gravity”) versus the human systems that surround it—forms, approvals, budgets, compliance, and institutional friction (“paperwork”). Its humor depends on anticlimax: after conquering a fundamental force of nature, the speaker is still stalled by bureaucracy. Read more broadly, it comments on modern “big science,” where engineering brilliance must coexist with administrative process, and where organizational constraints can feel as daunting as technical ones.