Leroy Chiao Quotes

One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were.

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

I remember; I was 15 years old when Neil Armstrong put feet in the moon.

I had as much time to prepare for that moon landing as NASA did, and I still was speechless when it happened. It just was so awe-inspiring to actually be able to see the thing through the television that was a miracle in itself.

The successful landing on the moon, very probably, is the best story.

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 actually don't remember Apollo 11 exactly because, at the time, I was five years old. The landing happened at night, and the walk on the moon happened at night eastern time, and I asked my parents; my mom said I was probably asleep, and so I just don't have any recollection. I do have recollection of the later missions to the moon.

Apollo 11 was the movie premiere of moon landings, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Neil was a bit of a mystic, but also a taciturn guy from what I can tell. He really saw the moon as looking like the American high desert. He wasn't someone who dealt in metaphors.

Space fascinated me because I'm from the generation that saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon live on TV. I was 7 at the time. Also, 'Lost in Space' was one of my favorite shows on TV back then.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

Neil Armstrong, when he was out there landing on the moon, I was there first.

As a card-carrying space nerd and NASA's chief scientist, I love space movies, from 'Star Trek' to 'Star Wars' to my all-time favorite - 'The Dish', an Australian comedy that celebrates that first moment when Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of our moon.

I have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon.

I watched the first moon landing at a bar in Paducah, Kentucky, a fact worth mentioning only because I still remember how suddenly silence descended on this raucous place when Neil Armstrong started coming down that ladder.

I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.

Did a man really walk on the moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered.

I had the good fortune and the gift to be one of the 12 men to walk on the moon.

In space-flight terms, six landings on the moon back in the Sixties and Seventies doesn't mean much.

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

Literally, my earliest memory, my earliest vivid memory, is the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Yeah, I was in fourth grade, and I was just so captivated. And I think you'll find a lot of space scientists of my generation will say the same thing. Apollo was a big event for them.

I felt most proud on the success of the Apollo mission.

Walking on the moon is now something that people used to do, in the distant past, like macramé, decoupage and the Hustle.... There will just be the pictures, then, as we saw them in the summer of '69, ghostly and blurry, colorless and incomprehensible, an infant's glimpse of a new world.

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

As plans for the first lunar landing started to be made, nobody had really thought about who would be out first.