Alan Bean Quotes

As I ran along, I remember... saying to myself, 'You know, this is really the moon. We're really here... That's the Earth up there.' And I said it two or three times to myself.

We’re on the moon,” Sadie murmured. “El Paso, Texas,” Bast corrected.

'What was being on the moon literally like?' [. . .] 'Being on the moon?' His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. 'It was just like being here.'

The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else...no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon I cried

I expected the unexpected and went [on the Moon] with an open mind. I think the visual scene was described by my words on first landing - "magnificent desolation." Magnificent for the achievement of being there, and desolate for the eons of lifelessness.

Landing on the moon was a dream that millions of kids have had for hundreds of years.

I can remember walking on the moon.

I think after orbiting for a while and looking at the surface, I think the natural tendency is to want to experience it, to go down there and touch it. I started thinking about the Apollo astronauts who orbited the moon and didn't land - that must have been agonizing!

What fiction could match - in drama or suspense - man's first walk on the Moon?

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.

The exciting part for me, as a pilot, was the landing on the moon. That was the time that we had achieved the national goal of putting Americans on the moon. The landing approach was, by far, the most difficult and challenging part of the flight. Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable. So the feeling of elation accompanied the landing rather than the walking.

You can't land on the moon and say, "Ooh, it's all sticky! It's covered in jam!

If I ever get to go to the moon, I'll probably just stand on the moon and go 'Hmmm, yeah...fair enough...gotta go home now.'

When you head on out to the Moon, in very short order, and you get a chance to look back at the Earth, that horizon slowly curves around in upon himself, and all of sudden you're looking at something that is very strange, but yet is very, very familiar, because you're beginning to see the Earth evolve.

I can honestly say - and it's a big surprise to me - that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.

Walking around on the moon was significantly easier than we'd thought it would be. There weren't any balance problems, so you weren't tumbling over.

We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.

All the Chinese have to do is fly around the Moon and back, and they'll appear to have won the return to the Moon with humans. They could put one person on the surface of the Moon for one day and he'd be a national hero.

The only time I had what you would call life-threatening fear was when I was on the Moon. Towards the end of our stay, we got excited and we were going to do the high jump, and I jumped and fell over backwards. That was a scary time, because if the backpack got broken, I would have had it. But everything held together.

Having walked on the Moon, I know something about what we need to explore, really explore, in space.

I'm quite disappointed that I'm still the last man on the moon.

Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I'm on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding - yet beautiful - Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.

I remember it was hard to believe that I was taking a step onto the lunar surface.