Stephanie Savage Quotes

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 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.

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.

As plans for the first lunar landing started to be made, nobody had really thought about who would be out first.

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.

When the history books are written in a thousand years, when space travel would have become routine, the moment that humans first left Earth will be of huge importance. Star City is a central part of this story and it deserves more recognition.

So many people I talk to who work in technology, you ask them, 'What got you interested in science?' and those from my generation say, 'The Apollo landings.'

There was a lot of risk taken in the Mercury and Apollo eras, and we don't take those risks anymore. We've designed the systems to eliminate risk, which makes it take forever and cost too much money.

We have never lost a crew member on the space station, but of course, the Columbia accident. I was - I'd already been an astronaut for a decade when the crew of Columbia was killed. And I went through test pilot school. Rick Husband and I were out at Edwards at test pilot school together. He was the commander of Columbia.

Our goal is to show that you can develop a robust, safe manned space program and do it at an extremely low cost.

No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents.

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.

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

Since the Columbia accident, the Russian space agency, or the Russian space program, has been literally carrying the load bringing us all the supplies we need on the Progress vehicle, smaller amounts on the Soyuz vehicles.

During my 8 years as chairman, I had the privilege to peer into the future to see dynamic citizen astronauts returning to and from the heavens which we can expect in the future.

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.

After the loss of Columbia a couple of years ago, I think we were reminded of the risk. All of us, though, have always known that the Space Shuttle is a very risky vehicle, much more risky than even flying airplanes in combat.

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.

I remember the moon landings, and Apollo was the paradigm by which all progress was measured at that time. And I knew that creating a true space-faring civilization was both possible and practical. What I failed to realize was that the effort would fail due to bureaucratic inertia and political apathy.

Many of us in Congress have been calling on the Administration to articulate a bold mission for NASA. It seems that the President is answering that call. I wholeheartedly support his vision for going back to the moon, and from there to worlds beyond.

We're not going to get humans to Mars until at least the mid-2030s, and the world is going to change by then.

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.

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.

The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.