Gene Kranz Quotes

Astronauts are very professional and when they're preparing for launch, they prepare for it as the most serious endeavor of our lives.

He who commands an Apollo flight will not command a second one.

When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.

NASA's charter is to give Americans the means to get into the wild, black yonder, beyond even the grasp of the federal government that funded it.

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

And now for Return to Flight, I'm chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian.

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

My key aim is to get man on the surface of Mars by the mid-2030s.

'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.

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

The basic thing you have to understand is everything that happens on that spaceship, from the time you crawl into that seat to the time it touches down, is controlled from the ground. There's no one thing that makes a good astronaut. I don't know any person with determination and will that can't go to space.

Going to Mars would make NASA great again.

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.

The astronaut corps is a very small part of a very large team that enables human spaceflight.

Astronauts have been stuck in low-Earth orbit, boldly going nowhere. American attempts to kick-start a new phase of lunar exploration have stalled amid the realisation that NASA's budget is too small for the job.

I would suspect strongly that over a period of time, if we put our mind to going to Mars, it will be a consortium of several countries.

With the mission to Mars, the whole world wants to get involved. So we actually have 13 different space agencies from around the world working on the global exploration road map.

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.

In Mars, we've been given a wonderful set of moons... where we can send continuous numbers of people.

The big reason why we don't have space colonies and regular trips to the moon is that flying into outer space is just plain 'hard.' The business of safely transporting people off the Earth is a costly affair that requires a lot of technology.

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

Clearly, some creative thinking is badly needed if humans are to have a future beyond Earth. Returning to the Moon may be worthy and attainable, but it fails to capture the public's imagination. What does get people excited is the prospect of a mission to Mars.

The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.

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

Every couple of years, we could dispatch people from Earth to Mars.