John C. Mather Quotes

I want to get to the moon. I want to go to Mars.

I would much rather fly on Soyuz than the shuttle.

The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space.

Mankind will not forever remain on Earth but, in the pursuit of light and space, will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space.

You don't think about the danger. The spaceship becomes your home.

While human space travel is daunting, machines - with their indefinitely long lifetimes - could travel the galaxy. It might make little difference to them that bridging the distance from one star to the next could take hundreds of thousands of years or more.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

It is rash to set limits to the progress of science. A man who had maintained at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee that within fifty years one would fly the Atlantic in a matter of hours would have risked being certified and locked up; yet we have seen this happen, and in the circumstances I am not prepared to rule out with any confidence the possibility one day of journeys through space in vessels carrying supplies of food and oxygen to the moon and the nearer planets.

I'd love to go into space again if there were a mission to Mars. I'd also love to go to a completely different planetary system, out of our solar system.

A lot of people, I think, would love to see the earth from above, wear a spacesuit. Certainly, when I was a kid, I wanted to wear a spacesuit.

Once you get into the spacecraft, you're on your way, you've got a mission, you're focused, and it's really exciting.

It is a little bit surreal to know that you are in your own little spaceship, and a few inches from you is instant death.

How can you say that Neil Armstrong went up to the moon in a little spaceship just for the craic but another planet can't send someone here?

Rocket Man, burning out his fuse up here alone.

The thing I like most about flying in space is not the view. The thing I like about it is doing something I feel very, very strongly about.

I would love to set foot on another planet - lunar or Mars or somewhere.

Going to Mars is a bunch of baby steps, and it started off with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin.

We send messages all the time, free of charge. There's a big shell out there now, 80 light-years around us. A civilization only a little more advanced than we are can pick those things up.

We try to keep it a normal day while we're up in space. You know, you don't want to change your time cycle too much, so we just keep it normal. And so, about 5 or 6 o'clock at night, after we finish working, we knock it off by having prerecorded shows that we watch sometimes through the computer while we're eating dinner.

It seems like in the beginning of my flight, the space dreams were rare. And now, almost 150 days into it, the Earth dreams are more of the rare ones.

Spaceflight is a tricky business. It is definitely difficult, and I think we forget that sometime.

Walking in space is absolutely the most exhilarating part of a mission. The view is just incredible.

Flying in space is a privilege, whether it's the first time or the fourth time.

My first mission was six and a half months. We weren't exactly sure how long it was going to be because I went up and back on the space shuttle, which was dependent on weather for launch and landing.

Eventually we're going to go to Mars, and I firmly believe the first person that sets foot on Mars will get there on a Boeing rocket.