David Mackay Quotes

Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.

It's very sad that there's going to be a hiatus in manned space flight from the U.S. The Shuttle was a fantastic, hugely complex vehicle. It was inevitable it would come to an end, but this is the opportunity for the commercial world to get involved. As the Shuttle era ends, another window of opportunity opens.

On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background - the commander and the pilot.

What I'm trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

It's time to open the space frontier to citizen explorers.

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.

I didn't go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.

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.

I've put a lot of my life into making it possible to fly in space at all.

My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I've got kids and responsibilities, so I can't be my own test pilot. That wouldn't be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it's a sensible thing to do.

By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface.

I have watched SS2 evolve over the years into an incredible vehicle that is going to open up space to more people than ever before.

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

With every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity.

By 1973, we had a space station, the Skylab, and we had multiple probes going up to planets. So, all this wonderful stuff happened in 10 to 15 years. About that time, there should have been enormous initiatives to make it affordable for people to fly in space, not just a handful of trained NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

Anything we can do in the near future that begins to stimulate the interest of people - seeing somebody down the street have an opportunity to go into space - buoys up the whole neighborhood.

Space exploration is important research to our economic and national defense, and America's space program is a symbol of our success as a scientifically and technologically advanced nation.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.

Space travel for everyone is the next frontier in the human experience.

Well, it's still a bit uncertain, but I will do the consulting, and I'll see how I can contribute. But I'm sure whatever I do will involve the space program. That's where my passion is.

Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.

Retain the vision for space exploration. If we turn our backs on the vision again, we're going to have to live in a secondary position in human space flight for the rest of the century.

It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected.