Alan Shepard Quotes

Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.

It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected.

I was a naval officer and aviator. I tested airplanes and got selected to be an astronaut later on.

I was interested in aerospace and flying, and the U.S. is really the best place in the world for flying.

I loved being a test pilot, and so being an astronaut was - was not my end point in, you know, either I achieved success by being an astronaut, or if I don't get picked, I'm not successful. I loved my career as a pilot, and it was a bonus to be selected as an astronaut.

All astronauts, even civilians like me without pilot experience, have to learn how to co-pilot a jet called a T-38.

I was stationed at the flight test center at Wright-Patterson, and I was flying a wide range of airplanes and giving them a lot of different tests. It was a job that I thoroughly enjoyed.

If you want more kids to become engineers in space, travellers, and pilots, then you have to expose them to those types of careers.

I got this letter asking me if I wanted to or if I would consider going to experimental test pilot school and becoming the first Negro astronaut and I thought it was crazy.

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

In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.

You know, being a test pilot isn't always the healthiest business in the world.

Astronauts working for the government will always need to be either pilots or mission specialists. Those who want to be pilots should have military experience - ideally, a test pilot background.

Nothing focuses your mind quite like flying a jet. That's one reason NASA requires that astronauts fly T-38s: it forces us to concentrate and prioritize in some of the same ways we need to in a rocket ship.

Not long after I got my test pilot qualification, I realised there was no manned space flight programme in the U.K., and there was unlikely to be one.

We were flying on a winged vehicle that would do reentry different than we had ever done before. So all of those were firsts. Test pilots truly love firsts.

It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut.

As astronauts know better than anyone else, risks, incidents, and mishaps are inevitable in the development of any high-performance vehicle. The emergence of supersonic flight during the 1940s and of the Century Series of fighters in the 1950s came with the loss of several test pilots. Still, it was a glorious time.

Aerospace services represents one of our biggest growth opportunities for the future.

And, so I set my goals on astronaut because, as a military aviator, it was, I considered that to be about the peak of a flying career.

I did want to be a pilot. I wanted to be a military pilot because I liked airplanes. I was interested in modeling airplanes.

I grew up thinking that I would become a fighter pilot and was fascinated by aircrafts as I had grown up around that. But my father encouraged me to not become an Air Force person, given the varied interests I had, be it books, movies, sports or fighter flying.

My first dream as a child was to become a pilot. My second dream was to become an astronomer, and I pursued in parallel efforts and studies in these two areas.

Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts.

Then, much later, my next dream was to become an astronaut, and I was fortunate to realize that dream, also.