Alan Shepard Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“You've done it in the simulator so many times, you don't have a real sense of being excited when the flight is going on. You're excited before, but as soon as the liftoff occurs, you are busy doing what you have to do.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“Whether you are an astronomer or a life scientist, geophysicist, or a pilot, you've got to be there because you believe you are good in your field, and you can contribute, not because you are going to get a lot of fame or whatever when you get back.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“I'd like to say I was smart enough to finish six grades in five years, but I think perhaps the teacher was just glad to get rid of me.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“You may not have any extra talent, but maybe you are just paying more attention to what you are doing.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“I know you're all saying I can go to the moon but I can't find Pasadena.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“If somebody'd said before the flight, 'Are you going to get carried away looking at the Earth from the Moon?' I would have say, 'No, no way.' But yet when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon, I cried.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“I realized up there that our planet is not infinite. It's fragile. That may not be obvious to a lot of folks, and it's tough that people are fighting each other here on Earth instead of trying to get together and live on this planet. We look pretty vulnerable in the darkness of space.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“The first plane ride was in a homemade glider my buddy and I built. Unfortunately we didn't get more than four feet off the ground, because it crashed.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“Later, in the early teens, I used to ride my bike every Saturday morning to the nearest airport, ten miles away, push airplanes in and out of the hangars, and clean up the hangars.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“The pilot looked at his cues of attitude and speed and orientation and so on and responded as he would from the same cues in an airplane, but there was no way it flew the same. The simulators had showed us that.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“I woke up an hour before I was supposed to, and started going over the mental checklist: where do I go from here, what do I do? I don't remember eating anything at all, just going through the physical, getting into the suit. We practiced that so much, it was all rote.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“Of course I was delighted the flight was over, but I still had to worry about cleaning up inside the cabin, I had to worry about the hatch, how to get in the sling, and so on.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“We had some adverse conditions in the '60s, in the '70s and the '80s. The agency has risen above that in the past and will rise above that again.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“Of course, in our grade school, in those days, there were no organized sports at all. We just went out and ran around the school yard for recess.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“Why don't you fix your little problem and light this candle?”
-- Alan Shepard -
“We're going to see passengers in space stations in 15 years, who will be able to buy a ticket and spend a weekend in space.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“On the periscope . . . . What a beautiful view. Cloud cover over Florida - three to four tenths near the eastern coast. Obscured up to Hatteras . . . I can see [lake] Okeechobee. Identify Andros Island. Identify the reefs.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“Al is on the surface. And it's been a long way, but we're here.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“I must admit, maybe I am a piece of history after all.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“We wanted to be in great shape, we wanted to be able to cope with zero gravity, we wanted to be able to cope with accelerations and decelerations and so on. So all of us trained so that we were probably in the best physical condition we had ever been in up until that point.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“There's no question that all the generations got excited about the first flights, with Kennedy's inspiration to go to the moon, leaving the planet for the first time, and fortunately coming back.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“Obviously I was challenged by becoming a Naval aviator, by landing aboard aircraft carriers and so on.”
-- Alan Shepard -
“You know, being a test pilot isn't always the healthiest business in the world.”
-- Alan Shepard