Sunita Williams Quotes

Yuri's Night is a world celebration for everyone who's interested in a human presence in space - without concern for politics, the Cold War, countries that do and don't have space programs.

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

I feel privileged and honored to have flown. It's been a tremendous ride, looking back on the legacy and accomplishments, like the Hubble telescope and the launching of the International Space Station in 1998.

There were about six years when there was not one American who went into space. We shouldn't do that again.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

America can take man to the moon, and America can take men to Mars - and beyond.

I'm Chinese-American, of course, and so it's very interesting to see China actually launch their own astronauts, becoming the third nation, following the United States and Russia, to do so.

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.

After the Shuttle checks out on its two upcoming flights, it will be ready to take larger components up to the International Space Station later this fall.

I've been approached to do some things with astronauts and the preparation that astronauts go through.

Iran wants to join the group of countries that want to know about the biggest things, like space.

I'm a very amateur scientist. For me, it started with the Mercury space program and onward to the moon landing in my impressionable adolescent years.

We continue to not only operate the International Space Station but to increase its capabilities as well as commercial contributions.

I don't think people have an appreciation for the work that it takes to pull these missions off, like humans living on the space station continuously for 15 years. It is a huge army of hard-working people to make it happen.

Getting to space for satellites is tough. Getting to space with humans aboard is even tougher.

I'm a major NASA nerd, so I've spent a lot of time learning about the space race and the Apollo missions.

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.

I think the crux of the matter was that if we were going to become partners in, for example, the International Space Station, we had to gain the respect of a country like the United States and particularly its space organization, NASA.

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.

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.

Everyone, red state, blue state, everyone supports space exploration.

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

We don't have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.

Well, with so many space shuttle missions that we've done, I think it's just sort of natural that each one hasn't necessarily gotten the attention that the early ones did.

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.