Rakesh Sharma Quotes

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.

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.

My desire to contribute to the spaceflight team as we move forward in our exploration of space has only increased over the years.

My expertise is the space program and what it should be in the future based on my experience of looking at the transitions that we've made between pre-Sputnik days and getting to the moon.

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

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

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

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.

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

All space projects push the frontiers of technology and are drivers of innovation.

I think I was very interested in the space program as a kid, watching the first Apollo missions to the moon, and it's something I thought that would be a lot of, of fun and exciting and a very worthwhile job.

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

As a member of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, I am a firm believer in the American space program.

NASA has been scattered to the four winds.

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.

If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.

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.

You see countries like India really investing in their space program because they see it as inspirational and good for their economy.

There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.

I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

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.

America can take man to the moon, and America can take men to Mars - and beyond.

I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated.

As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.

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.