Jim Lovell Quotes

I'd love to go back to space, I don't know any astronaut who doesn't want to.

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.

Astronauts are like these mythic legends, but really, they are just regular people, people who wear chinos.

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.

I've been approached to do some things with astronauts and the preparation that astronauts go through.

The great thing about being an astronaut is you kind of get to do a little bit of everything. I mean, we're going to ride a rocket uphill.

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I grew up in Houston. Gordo Cooper was my favorite astronaut.

I think I was very interested in the space program as a kid, watching the first Apollo missions to the moon, and it's something I thought that would be a lot of, of fun and exciting and a very worthwhile job.

There were about six years when there was not one American who went into space. We shouldn't do that again.

Sending a couple of guys to the Moon and bringing them back safely? That's a stunt! That's not historic.

Although as a boy I had dreamed about going into space, I had completely forgotten about that until one day I received a call from an astronaut, who suggested that I should join the program.

You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times... and safely home again.

I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door.

We got to the moon.

Every day, we get a little bit closer to the kind of expertise and the kind of experience we're going to need to go there. I'd love to be the guy walking on Mars.

I think most astronauts are not risk takers. We take calculated risks for something that we think is worthwhile.

Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

Then, much later, my next dream was to become an astronaut, and I was fortunate to realize that dream, also.

It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.

I remember looking at the moon as an 8-year-old and marveling that there were two astronauts in a lander on the surface, getting ready to go out and actually walk. That settled it for me: I knew I was going to at least try to become an astronaut. I wanted to be like those guys.

If I were to do a movie about Apollo 13, I'd be at NASA studying what it took to go into space. It's part of your job to go deep, to interview the right people.

I have had the privilege to be a member of many high-performance teams at NASA, both on and off the planet.

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!

I was the 128th human in space. So I didn't really sweat about it.