Alan Bean Quotes

The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.

Roger, liftoff, and the clock is started.

One of the jokes on our flight is that, if we have a normal entry day going, the plan is for me... to actually take the orbiter first and fly it for maybe 10 or 15 seconds and then hand it on over to Scooter.

It's, I mean, for me, it's the same as training with my crewmembers. We share the same first part of the flight. We all go together. It's the most critical part of the flight, the ascent.

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion - because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do.

I thought it was going to take a lot more countdowns on the pad. We actually did scrub once, but I figured we'd scrub several times since it's a pretty complicated vehicle.

When you see the orbiter headed out the launch pad and then crawling up the hill and being hard down on the pad, it does something to you.

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

So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

It was very difficult to control the descent. At a height of seven kilometres, I catapulted out of my capsule and parachuted down to Earth. I was very familiar with parachutes because I was a sky diver before.

The rocket had worked perfectly, and all I had to do was survive the reentry forces. You do it all, in a flight like that, in a rather short period of time, just 16 minutes as a matter of fact.

Once you get into the spacecraft, you're on your way, you've got a mission, you're focused, and it's really exciting.

When you're on a Soyuz flight, you know that when you go to Russia, you're going to do X, Y, and Z. You have that plan already laid out.

The truth is, every single rocket launch off of planet Earth is risky.

President Obama is launching a new $6 billion space policy that will ultimately take astronauts to Mars. Of course, it's $6 billion and $45 if the astronauts have a carry-on.

President Bush announced a billion dollar mission to the moon and Mars. He came up with a snappy new slogan - to drill where no man has drilled before.

Seriously, I would go in a second. I'd be the first actor in space and I'd love to do it.

We are going into space, and we need protection. And in case we need to space walk, we'll have to go outside.

I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon.

So you're back from outer space.

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.

There had been a number of failures but we weren't going out to ride a failure. And we felt they'd corrected all the difficulties with the boosters before that time and the launch problems. And so we had a lot of confidence that there was going to be a successful mission. We weren't off on some suicide effort, certainly.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth.

If we were to start today on an organized and well-supported space program I believe a practical passenger rocket can be built and tested within ten years.