Rakesh Sharma Quotes

I respect the view of a rating agency, but I do not make a budget for the rating agency. I make a budget for the people of India.

We actually look to the scientific community to kind of come back to NASA and tell us what the priorities should be. And then at NASA, we try to look within our budget and say, 'What can we accommodate, and what are the most important things for the nation?'

If we go back to the moon, we're guaranteed second, maybe third place because while we are spending all that money, Russia has its eye on Mars. Landing people on the moon will be terribly consuming of resources we don't have. It sounds great - 'Let's go back. This time we're going to stay.' I don't know why you would want to stay on the moon.

Not only has this subject been long associated with the ideas of thinking men over the ages but its practical importance is attested to by the huge resources of men and material thrown into this type of work.

Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.

Not long after I got my test pilot qualification, I realised there was no manned space flight programme in the U.K., and there was unlikely to be one.

Geez, all that money we waste on space exploration; just think how many bombs that would buy!

The International Space Station is a phenomenal laboratory, an unparalleled test bed for new invention and discovery. Yet I often thought, while silently gazing out the window at Earth, that the actual legacy of humanity's attempts to step into space will be a better understanding of our current planet and how to take care of it.

In the United States, there is no project so audacious for which people cannot be found to guarantee the cost and find the working expenses.

When someone tells me, 'Oh, we have so many problems on Earth; space exploration costs too much money,' I say, 'I absolutely agree with you. But I still hope we do it.'

For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market.

To create a housing shortage in a huge country, heavily wooded, with a small population—ah, that's proof of pure political genius.

While we have appropriated money year after year to expand the agencies the agencies, departments, and the White House staff, we have neglected to staff ourselves adequately to meet our oversight responsibilities.

The essence of government is making necessary choices between competing uses of public resources.

It is imperative that in this race, the U.S. must be first across the finish line.

Instead of condemning Israel, the underdeveloped countries should take it as an example of how to build an advanced, prosperous nation.

Our rockets can find Halley's comet, and fly to Venus with amazing accuracy, but side by side with these scientific and technical triumphs is an obvious lack of efficiency in using scientific achievements for economic needs, and many Soviet household appliances are of poor quality.

The American people prefer military rockets to public schools and flights to the moon to urban renewal.

Just to continue a space program because it's a space program? No, I don't think we have an obligation for that.

The conquest of space is not merely a technological project of interest to a handful of select scientists and specialists, valuable though that research and information may be.

A country without engineering skill and knowledge will never become a developed country.

The really basic stuff that fuels 30-year job booms almost always comes from government research, stuff like biotech, the transistor, the Internet. The idea that private capital can handle the early spade work is a joke.

If we gutted NASA Earth Science, it wouldn't be NOAA or some other agency that would take the lead. It would be the Chinese and the Europeans and the Japanese.

We are not going to use money from the people of the state of Missouri for what I believe is corporate welfare. We've got far too many core priorities of government that have to be invested in.

We are growing the economy in smart ways and rebuilding our infrastructure and investing in science and development and that we stay true to those values that helped to get us here.