Charles Duke Quotes

I can remember walking on the moon.

On Earth, I weighed 150 pounds; my suit and backpack weighed another 150. 300 pounds. Up there, I weighed only 50. So I could prance around on my toes. It was quite easy to do.

In 2009 I went up on the space shuttle. I was in space for 16 days and docked at the space station for 11 days. The entire crew did five space walks, of which I was involved with three of them. When you're doing a space walk, you always have a buddy with you. It's a very dangerous environment when you're doing a space walk.

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

Having walked on the Moon, I know something about what we need to explore, really explore, in space.

It was hard for me to believe. I would look down and say, 'This is the moon, this is the moon,' and I would look up and say, 'That's the Earth, that's the Earth,' in my head. So, it was science fiction to us even as we were doing it.

Everybody knows what the moon is, everybody knows what this decade is, and everybody can tell a live astronaut who returned from the moon from one who didn't

I cannot wait to get up there and experience space travel for the first time. It will be a dream come true.

Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.

I can't think of anything that's as exciting as I'm sure this mission will be, and actually being in space. But, we did some training as a crew together.

I like acting for now. But after seeing Apollo 13, what I really want to do is to be an astronaut. I'm dying to go to a space camp next summer!

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

Walking around on the moon was significantly easier than we'd thought it would be. There weren't any balance problems, so you weren't tumbling over.

Believe it or not, I'd love to go to the moon.

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

All the Chinese have to do is fly around the Moon and back, and they'll appear to have won the return to the Moon with humans. They could put one person on the surface of the Moon for one day and he'd be a national hero.

I was motivated to improve the U.S. strategy of going back to the moon in 1985. That's a long time ago. Going back to the moon would be a great achievement for tourism adventure flights.

Being outside during the space walk, the view of the Earth is just spectacular, and getting a chance to do that is just unbelievable, everything about it. You are going around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, so you have 45 minutes of sunlight followed by 45 minutes of darkness. You do a lap every 90 minutes.

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.

It's hard not to be excited when you're going to find a way to land on the moon.

Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I'm on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding - yet beautiful - Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.

I remember it was hard to believe that I was taking a step onto the lunar surface.

Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself.

It's a really big deal to do a spacewalk. It's much riskier than staying indoors. It's complex. It uses up a lot of the precious resources onboard. It uses up oxygen. It uses up carbon dioxide scrubbers.

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.