Alan Shepard Quotes

The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.

Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.

Astronauts are very professional and when they're preparing for launch, they prepare for it as the most serious endeavor of our lives.

The Progress is launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, just like the Soyuz. It almost looks the same as the Soyuz but unmanned, so, essentially filled up with supplies for us - anything from food, science experiments, repair parts, etc., can go in it.

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I grew up in Houston. Gordo Cooper was my favorite astronaut.

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic.

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.

For the last several years and culminating in six months in orbit next year, I've been training for my third space flight. This one is almost in a category completely different than the previous two, specifically to live in on the space station for six months, to command a space ship and to fly a new rocket ship.

I thought it was going to take a lot more countdowns on the pad. We actually did scrub once, but I figured we'd scrub several times since it's a pretty complicated vehicle.

When you see the orbiter headed out the launch pad and then crawling up the hill and being hard down on the pad, it does something to you.

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

NASA projects often have romantic names that link into a long history of exploration and adventure: Atlantis and Discovery, for example.

I get standing ovations at meetings when I say Britain should be involved in human spaceflight. Unfortunately, that goal has been blocked by a handful of people in high office.

Rendezvous day is the third day of our mission, and that's a big day for us.

Finally my dream came true in that there was a possibility that I could travel to the International Space Station. I've gone through the medicals and the training and now I'm officially, by the Russian Space Federation, a cosmonaut in training.

The rocket had worked perfectly, and all I had to do was survive the reentry forces. You do it all, in a flight like that, in a rather short period of time, just 16 minutes as a matter of fact.

I operated a periscopic TV camera so the commander, Anatoly Artsebarsky, could establish where we were heading. It is real teamwork on Soyuz.

It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.

I wanted to get superimposed on a shuttle launch.

There's nothing I would like more than to watch a manned Mars landing.

Unless you have manned [space] travel, you don't stir the imagination of people.

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.