David Grinspoon Quotes

I was eight years old when I saw the Apollo moon landing in 1969. I was riveted.

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.

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

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.

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.

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

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

Most people never believed in the real possibility of going to the moon, and neither did I until I was in my twenties.

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 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.

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.

In the late '60s, I was seven, eight, nine years old, and what was going on in the news at that time that really excited a seven, eight, nine year old boy was the Space Race.

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.'

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

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.

I was only in second grade when the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The night of his launch - April 12, 1961 - I went out onto the front porch and stared up at the stars, trying to see his capsule passing overhead. Like millions of others, I was enthralled by the idea of space exploration and have been ever since.

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

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.

One of my early heroes was Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

Three decades ago, in a top story of the century, Americans placed six flags on the Moon. Today we no longer try for new and bold space achievements; instead, we celebrate the anniversaries of the past.

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

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.

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.