Leroy Chiao Quotes

The Americans are still the leaders in human space flight. I feel we have a danger here of kind of stagnating. We're kind of resting on our laurels and there's a danger going forward if we don't take bold steps to really support human space flight in this country that we could fall behind. After the space shuttle is retired, we're going to have a big gap, five to seven years, at least where we're not going to have the ability to send our own astronauts into space, we'll have to buy rides on the Russian Soyuz, and so that will be a pretty big step down for us.

I think it's good to have competition. Now we have a third country that can launch astronauts, so it's good for all of us. It makes us a little bit more competitive and wanting to be the leader.

If I could get one message to you it would be this: the future of this country and the welfare of the free world depends upon our success in space. There is no room in this country for any but a fully cooperative, urgently motivated all-out effort toward space leadership. No one person, no one company, no one government agency, has a monopoly on the competence, the missions, or the requirements for the space program.

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.

I was born in 1960 and can still tell you the name of every astronaut from Mercury to Apollo. If I had a chance, I'd love to go into space on one of the privately developed space crafts.

Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.

We will certainly see teachers, journalists, artists and poets in space. Whatever it takes to the be the best is what it will take to get you into space.

I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo and of course going to the moon as the main part of the Apollo program.

Is manned space exploration important? Yes - not least because it simply works much better than sending robots.

The beauty of the space station, and of human spaceflight, is that it is now at a level of maturity where you can invite people on-board, which is what I worked so hard to do on social media and all the videos I made.

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.

The future of humanity in space will be determined by the answer to a key question: What will happen first, the first human born in space or the first combat fatality in space?

I never thought about it, really, that I am going to be the second generation of the space cosmonauts. I just want to do my job as best as is possible, and that's it, honestly.

We certainly would not be here, living and working on the International Space Station without the commitment and dedication of all the folks who worked the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Programs as well as the Russian Space Program.

I think the only way that the U.S. human spaceflight program is going to get really revitalized, really put sort of an Apollo level push on it, is if some other country, perhaps China, were to actually have a landed flight to the moon and brought back our American flag and put it in Tiananmen Square.

Competition-driven innovation and price pressure that commercial practices foster can only make human spaceflight ever more common and U.S. leadership in this domain ever clearer.

That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.

The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.

It seems farther away now because there are no rockets getting there. Nobody is going.

It's not easy to get human beings into orbit. So far only three nations have been able to do that, with all the resources that they put together. And I'm just a little skeptical that that's going to be done by the private sector without making use of what has been done by the government.

Space is not a two-year objective. It used to be, in the early '60's, we had this eye candy of Mercury and Gemini and Apollo and every year we would do something more and more and it met those needs. But the easy stuff has been done.

I know you're all saying I can go to the moon but I can't find Pasadena.

Under a Trump administration, Florida and America will lead the way into the stars.

We used to joke about canned men, putting people in a can and seeing how far you can send them and bring them back. That's not the purpose of this program... Space is a laboratory, and we go into it to work and learn the new.