Frank Borman Quotes

As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes.

The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.

I think a colony in space will take much longer than sci fiction writers think. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of anything into near earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. It costs about $100,000 a pound to put you on the moon. And it costs $1,000,000 a pound to put you on Mars.

There's an old saying in the space community: 'If God wanted us to be a spacefaring species, he would have given us a moon'.

How we use the knowledge we gain determines our progress on earth, in space or on the moon. Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.

Proper accounting is like engineering. You need a margin of safety. Thank God we don't design bridges and airplanes the way we do accounting.

In my mind, public space travel will precede efforts toward exploration -- be it returning to the moon, going to Mars, visiting asteroids, or whatever seems appropriate. We've got millions and millions of people who want to go into space, who are willing to pay. When you figure in the payload potential of customers, everything changes.

I've said multiple times that the world's first trillionaire is going to be the person who exploits the resources of asteroids, the natural resources that are rare on earth and common on selected asteroids. So there are many different reasons you might want to go into space. You might want to spend your honeymoon on the far side of the moon.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives.

It's tiny out there...it's inconsequential. It's ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth.

I think I need to continue to think and plan and marry all of the different things that we could do that make transportation in space from the earth to the space station, from the earth to the moon to space stations around the moon to visiting an asteroid.

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.

To call a Christian a theist is roughly equivalent to calling the space shuttle Atlantis a glider.

They said you can't go to the moon. They said you can't put cheese inside a pizza crust, but NASA did it. They had to, because the cheese kept floating off in space.

The Russians haven't been to the moon. You know why? Because they're space pussies... You really want to impress us? Bring us back our FLAG!

The Space Shuttle is the most effective device known to man for destroying dollar bills.

With space travel, [it's] no different. You know, in 1990 I read the name Virgin Galactic Airways. Loved the name. And set out to try to find an engineer or rocket scientist in the world who could build a safe, reusable rocket that could take people to and from space and we could start a whole new era of commercial space travel.

You know something I could really do without? The Space Shuttle. ... It's irresponsible. The last thing we should be doing is sending our grotesquely distorted DNA out into space.

The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.

I ended up realizing that NASA was unlikely to get me into space, or get me to the moon or beyond, and I needed some other way to drive this.

Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.

Well, Frank, my thoughts are very similar. The vast loneliness up here at the moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize what you have back there on earth. The earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.

Man must at all costs overcome the Earth's gravity and have, in reserve, the space at least of the Solar System. All kinds of danger wait for him on the Earth. . . . We have said a great deal about the advantages of migration into space, but not all can be said or even imagined.

Everyone who's been in space would, I'm sure, welcome the opportunity for a return to the exhilarating experiences there. For me, a flight in a shuttle, though most satisfying, would be anticlimactic after my flight to the moon. Plus, if I pursued a flight myself, people would think that was the reason I am trying to generate interest in public spaceflight. And that's not the purpose - I want to generate interest in long-range space exploration.

And yet ... But what if ... I want to do something impossible. Something astounding and unheard of. I want to scrub the moss off the Space Shuttle and fly Julie to the moon and colonise it, or float a capsized cruise ship to some distant island where no one will protest us, or just harness the magic that brings me into the brains of the Living and use it to bring Julie into mine, because it's warm in here, it's quiet and lovely, and in here we aren't an absurd juxtaposition, we are perfect.