Valentina Tereshkova Quotes

Apollo 11 was the movie premiere of moon landings, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Neil was a bit of a mystic, but also a taciturn guy from what I can tell. He really saw the moon as looking like the American high desert. He wasn't someone who dealt in metaphors.

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 Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems, too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work.

We didn't go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we're Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat.

I see Vostok-6 quite often in the centre for cosmonaut training. And every time I pass it by, I stroke it and say, 'My lovely one, my best and most beautiful friend, my best and most beautiful man.'

In the late '60s, I was seven, eight, nine years old, and what was going on in the news at that time that really excited a seven, eight, nine year old boy was the Space Race.

It was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology. And so it was against that backdrop that the early space flights took off.

To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.

Why should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure?

There weren't any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.

Competition and competitive rhetoric can be healthy. It's what drove the United States to pursue the Soviet Union into space, creating countless innovations along the way.

We were young, we were pilots, and we were hungry to test the new technology of 'space machines.' And we all wanted to be first.

In 1962, President Kennedy succeeded in captivating Americans by explaining the advantages of being the first country to reach the moon and the dangers of allowing another nation to beat us there.

I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut.

Did a man really walk on the moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered.

Lunokhod

There is very little difference between men and women in space.

Lunik

After six successful Apollo flights, including two lunar landings, people were getting bored.

When 'Apollo 13' appeared as an opportunity and I began to tackle that in as authentic a way as I possibly could, I really became enthralled by the philosophical side of space travel and why we need to explore - what it means to us here on Earth - all of those things. I became a huge proponent.

In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.

It is practically certain that sometime during 1958, either the Russians or we, and most likely both, are going to shoot a rocket to the moon.

I was with Tom Wolfe at the launch of Apollo 17, which led him to 'The Right Stuff.'

The Russians were responsible for the Chekov character. They put in 'Pravda' that, 'Ah, the ugly Americans are at it again. They do a space show, and they forget to include the people who were in space first.' And I said, 'My God, they're right.'

The Russians had got a real head-start into space; America was playing catch-up.