John M. Grunsfeld Quotes

The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.

I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut.

When President Kennedy challenged Americans to go to the moon, the question wasn't whether we'd get there, it was only when we'd get there.

I grew up in the 1960s and wanted to become part of the great space exploration effort, but when I graduated from college in 1974, the Apollo program was over, and the country had moved into this pessimistic mode. We had entered the 'age of limits.'

We can dream about putting a man on the Moon, and within a decade, we actually made it happen.

As a young boy growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was inspired by the nascent space age.

I respect John Kennedy for saying that he had a dream that we'd go to the moon before the end of the decade.

For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space.

When the history books are written in a thousand years, when space travel would have become routine, the moment that humans first left Earth will be of huge importance. Star City is a central part of this story and it deserves more recognition.

I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo and of course going to the moon as the main part of the Apollo program.

American greatness was elevated significantly after Sputnik.

Space exploration is important research to our economic and national defense, and America's space program is a symbol of our success as a scientifically and technologically advanced nation.

In 1962, President Kennedy succeeded in captivating Americans by explaining the advantages of being the first country to reach the moon and the dangers of allowing another nation to beat us there.

I don't think the space station is innovative. Going to the moon was innovative because we had no idea how to do it.

In a way, J.F.K. was the high point of the American dream. In order to go to the moon and back, all we did was say we could - and we did.

When I was 12, I saw the Apollo moon landings, and I thought that was really fantastic and exciting and thought, 'That's what I want to do.'

I think it's like that for people who don't remember 1969 first-hand. It's that sense of 'old hat.' Of 'been there, done that.' Space shuttles, space stations, communications satellites, GPS - they're all part of our everyday, taken-for-granted world in 2009, not part of an incredible odyssey.

I'm a very amateur scientist. For me, it started with the Mercury space program and onward to the moon landing in my impressionable adolescent years.

The moon landing was such a magnificent accomplishment in U.S. space history. I think that boots on the moon was just one indicator of the rapid technology advancement and really just showed what we can do when all of us are dedicated to a single goal over a long period of time.

I was born outside Kennedy Space Center.

I think it's really a sign of great American strength that we do invest the money we do in technology, in these hard projects, in NASA.

When President Kennedy set us on a path to the Moon in the 1960s, he knew exactly why - to produce a photo-op that would clearly show America would be the winner in the decades-long battle of political systems called the Cold War.

I'm a major NASA nerd, so I've spent a lot of time learning about the space race and the Apollo missions.

In the '60s astronauts were rockstars. Everyone wanted to be an astronaut.

When I was a child, and I was at our school, everybody's parents were involved in space program. In every class, we have several kids whose fathers were flown cosmonauts or who prepared for the flight.