Douglas Brinkley Quotes

Sending a couple of guys to the Moon and bringing them back safely? That's a stunt! That's not historic.

I was a graduate student in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan called for the construction of a new space station. I knew then that I wanted to apply for the astronaut program, and this was an exciting development.

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.

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.

As plans for the first lunar landing started to be made, nobody had really thought about who would be out first.

I was only a hero by default. The flights were few and far between. There weren't that many astronauts. The moon flights were so interesting and exciting.

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.

'Anthony and the Magic Picture Frame' tells it like it really was in America's early space program - the adventure, the risks, and the rewards.

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

You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times... and safely home again.

I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.

I get standing ovations at meetings when I say Britain should be involved in human spaceflight. Unfortunately, that goal has been blocked by a handful of people in high office.

We got to the moon.

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.

At the end of October 4 in 1957, when I was coming back from sea duty in the South Pacific, Sputnik went up. I realized that humans would be right behind robot aircraft or spacecraft even though I really had no plans of being in aviation or a professional aviator and certainly not in the military.

I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67. That program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us.

I remember; I was 15 years old when Neil Armstrong put feet in the moon.

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

The Space Program is an investment of the nation’s future…. Humans will not be confined to this planet forever.

If you go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, you can see the burn patterns on Friendship 7.

The Chinese are planning a manned mission to the moon sometime after 2020, and subsequently, to Mars. The U.S. has abandoned that dream.

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

I believe that there will be women astronauts sometime just as there are women airplane pilots.

Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.

Things felt pretty crazy on earth in 1969, but the cosmos was friendly. Astronauts had round-trip tickets; they got home.