David Mackay Quotes

Most people never believed in the real possibility of going to the moon, and neither did I until I was in my twenties.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

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.

If you look, like, in 1960, there was no such thing as an astronaut. It was a totally fanciful concept, but nine years later or whatever, we were landing on the moon, which is just astonishing.

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.

We got to the moon.

I had the good fortune and the gift to be one of the 12 men to walk on the moon.

It was an incredible series, 'From The Earth To The Moon.' All of it's great.

When Kennedy said, 'Let's go to the moon,' we didn't yet have a vehicle that wouldn't kill you on launch. He said we'll land a man on the moon in eight years and bring him back. That was an audacious goal to put forth in front of the American people.

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

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

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

I don't think the space station is innovative. Going to the moon was innovative because we had no idea how to do it.

Somebody else can be the first man on the moon. It doesn't interest me at all.

I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be something like that again. We'll just have to see.

I was inspired by the men who walked on the moon. It really was my inspiration, I think, you know, as a kid of 9 years old - I know I'm dating myself, but - I thought, 'What a cool job!'

Everybody knows what the moon is, everybody knows what this decade is, and everybody can tell a live astronaut who returned from the moon from one who didn't

Landing on the moon was a dream that millions of kids have had for hundreds of years.

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.

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 I was very interested in the space program as a kid, watching the first Apollo missions to the moon, and it's something I thought that would be a lot of, of fun and exciting and a very worthwhile job.

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic.

What I'm trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.

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