Spaceflight Quotes:

Spaceflight isn't just about doing experiments, it's about an extension of human culture.

- Chris Hadfield

source: Source: www.slate.com

topic: Culture, Spaceflight, Experiments

Achieving something that has never existed in manned spaceflight and that is high volume and public access.

- Burt Rutan

source: Source: bigthink.com

topic: Achieve, Volume, Spaceflight

Of course risk is part of spaceflight. We accept some of that to achieve greater goals in exploration and find out more about ourselves and the universe.

- Lisa Nowak

topic: Space, Goal, Risk, Space Travel, Space Flight

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

topic: Space, Government, Safety, Outer Space, Spaceflight

Once you've been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is.

- Valentina Tereshkova

topic: Space, Appreciate, Earth, Spaceflight

If people can see Earth from up here, see it without those borders, see it without any differences in race or religion, they would have a completely different perspective. Because when you see it from that angle, you cannot think of your home or your country. All you can see is one Earth....

- Anousheh Ansari

source: "Memories Of The Earth As Seen From Space" by Brandon Keim, www.wired.com. April 20, 2007.

topic: Country, Home, Thinking, Spaceflight, Cultural Differences

At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone, there was a constant surveillance by UFOs.

- Scott Carpenter

topic: Space, Surveillance, Astronaut, Spaceflight, Flying Saucers

I think the people who experienced the Apollo missions came away from that experience wondering to themselves, 'When can we get a chance to experience spaceflight?' I've heard that many, many times: that people got into a new career field hoping that they would be able to experience spaceflight.

- Buzz Aldrin

source: "Expert testimony on the space age". Q&A with Alan Boyle, www.nbcnews.com. July 19, 2004.

topic: Thinking, Careers, People, New Career, Spaceflight

If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on.

- Sheryl Sandberg

topic: Inspirational, Life, Motivational, Inspirational Career, Career Women

I think we need someone in a responsible political position to have the courage to say, 'Let's terminate human spaceflight.'

- James Van Allen

topic: Thinking, Political, Needs, Spaceflight

In a dispassionate comparison of the relative values of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable.

- James Van Allen

topic: Motivation, Adventure, Commitment, Dispassionate, Spaceflight

I want manned spaceflight, not just back to the Moon, but beyond that. And I want my daughters and my son to have their own July 20, 1969, to remember. Apollo 11 didn't give us wings; it only showed us how far the wings we had would take us.

- David Weber

topic: Daughter, Mother, Son, Spaceflight, Apollo 11

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily.

- Gene Kranz

source: Gene Kranz (2009). “Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond”, p.204, Simon and Schuster

topic: Should Have, Safety, Design, Spaceflight

We're working to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take time, and we're working on it methodically.

- Jeff Bezos

topic: Land, People, Cost, Spaceflight

Since Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard's epoch flights in 1961, all space missions have been flown only under large, expensive government efforts. By contrast, our program involves a few, dedicated individuals who are focused entirely on making spaceflight affordable.

- Burt Rutan

topic: Government, Space, Effort, Spaceflight

With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.

- Burt Rutan

topic: Running, Space, Luck, Pluto, Spaceflight

Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!

- Terence McKenna

topic: Moon, Getting High, Voyages, Spaceflight

Everyone who's been in space would, I'm sure, welcome the opportunity for a return to the exhilarating experiences there.

- Buzz Aldrin

topic: Opportunity, Space, Return, Spaceflight

There's a tremendously satisfying freedom associated with weightlessness. It's challenging in the absence of traction or leverage, and it requires thoughtful readjustment. I found the experience of weightlessness to be one of the most fun and enjoyable, challenging and rewarding, experiences of spaceflight. Returning to Earth brings with it a great sense of heaviness, and a need for careful movement. In some ways it's not too different from returning from a rocking ocean ship.

- Buzz Aldrin

source: Scholastic Interview, teacher.scholastic.com. November 17, 1998.

topic: Fun, Ocean, Thoughtful, Traction, Spaceflight

My position is that it is high time for a calm debate on more fundamental questions. Does human spaceflight continue to serve a compelling cultural purpose and/or our national interest? Or does human spaceflight simply have a life of its own, without a realistic objective that is remotely commensurate with its costs? Or, indeed, is human spaceflight now obsolete?

- James Van Allen

topic: Doe, Purpose, Cost, Spaceflight

I’m struck again by the irony that spaceflight-conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds-brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.

- Carl Sagan

source: Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.199, Ballantine Books

topic: Squabbles, Spaceflight, Stunning, Cauldrons

A hybrid human-robot mission to investigate an asteroid affords a realistic opportunity to demonstrate new technological capabilities for future deep-space travel and to test spacecraft for long-duration spaceflight.

- Buzz Aldrin

topic: Opportunity, Space, Long, Spacecraft, Spaceflight

As I'm sure you may know, I'm planning to become a spaceflight participant and have been recently approved to begin my spaceflight training by the Russian space federation having passed the necessary medical and physical tests.

- Sarah Brightman

topic: Space, Training, May, Spaceflight, Federation

If NASA is to reach beyond the Moon and someday reach Mars, it must be relieved of the burden of launching people and cargo to low earth orbit. To do that, we must invest more in commercial spaceflight.

- Bill Nye

topic: Moon, People, Mars, Nasa, Spaceflight

I would not say that female cosmonauts are not welcomed in the Russian space program. I must say, however, that all spaceflight hardware, including spacesuits and spacecraft comfort assuring systems, were designed mostly by men and for men.

- Valentina Tereshkova

topic: Men, Space, Comfort, Space Program, Spacecraft

NASA is doing nothing but development. They're not doing research in manned spaceflight at all and I see no reason for them to do that because we already know that it will work and we already know exactly how it will work.

- Burt Rutan

source: Source: bigthink.com

topic: Research, Development, Doing Nothing, Nasa, Spaceflight

I find myself now preaching about the golden age of manned spaceflight, because something went on there, within us, that we’re missing. When we went to the Moon, it was not only just standing on a new plateau for all mankind. We changed the way everybody in the world thought of themselves, you know. It was a change that went on inside of us. And we’re losing that.

- Walter Cunningham

topic: Change, Moon, Missing, Golden Age, Spaceflight