Tim Commerford Quotes

I worked on all of the Apollo manned missions and a couple of Apollo unmanned missions.

As far as, like, the moon landing... did we go there? I believe so. Is it everything that we're told? I don't think so.

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

Apollo 11 will probably go down in history as one of the major responses of two nations facing each other with threatening technologies - sometimes called mutually assured destruction. It was also the America's response to the apparent superiority of the Russians in putting objects into space before USA could.

To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.

The Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems, too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work.

I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.

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.

Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States.

I feel we need to remind the world about the Apollo missions and that we can still do impossible things.

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

After six successful Apollo flights, including two lunar landings, people were getting bored.

I was with Tom Wolfe at the launch of Apollo 17, which led him to 'The Right Stuff.'

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.'

Fifty years after humans landed on the moon for the first time, America has driven a golden spike on the trail to new space exploration feats through the work of our commercial partner SpaceX and all of the dedicated and talented flight controllers at NASA and our international partners.

On July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the most expensive selfie in history. As the apex of an 8-year, $130 billion effort, they posed in front of a camera and took a shot designed to do one thing - to show our free enterprise democratic system was better than the rigid, authoritarian system that wanted to destroy us.

At the time of Apollo 11, I was a grade-schooler, and I remember every time an Apollo mission would take place that, like a lot of little boys, I'd gather in front of the TV for hours and hours and hours with my little brother.

Apparently, we've been to the moon in 1969, 1970. We've been there six times, I don't believe a word of it. Some people do.

You think NASA is going to be cutting edge, but they've got so many buildings that are just left over from the '60s. It's old.

If you look, like, in 1960, there was no such thing as an astronaut. It was a totally fanciful concept, but nine years later or whatever, we were landing on the moon, which is just astonishing.

A space nerd as a kid, I learned early that putting a man on the moon took American unity, grit, determination, teamwork, hardship, innovation, sacrifice and patriotism.

NASA was invented as a response to Cold War steps. There are those who presumed that we went to the moon because we're explorers. We went to the moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. And so when it became clear that they (Soviet Union) were not going to the moon, we're done with the moon.

It was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology. And so it was against that backdrop that the early space flights took off.

It was a very strange time in the late 1950s/early 1960s, when people were putting things in space, but that language of spacecraft hadn't really congealed yet. A lot of artists at that time were looking at them as aesthetic objects.

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.