Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

I witnessed the building of the Space Shuttle Columbia, the first orbiter to be launched into space.

When I was 12, I saw the Apollo moon landings, and I thought that was really fantastic and exciting and thought, 'That's what I want to do.'

The United States ended the space shuttle program in 2011, after the ISS was complete. We gave up a national treasure forever.

I always admired the U.S. as the country of the space shuttle, of technological achievement.

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.

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

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.

We knew it was going to be difficult to get to the moon. We didn't know how difficult.

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.

There was a space program before there was integrated circuits.

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.

I feel we need to remind the world about the Apollo missions and that we can still do impossible things.

I think it's like that for people who don't remember 1969 first-hand. It's that sense of 'old hat.' Of 'been there, done that.' Space shuttles, space stations, communications satellites, GPS - they're all part of our everyday, taken-for-granted world in 2009, not part of an incredible odyssey.

I want manned spaceflight, not just back to the Moon, but beyond that. And I want my daughters and my son to have their own July 20, 1969, to remember. Apollo 11 didn't give us wings; it only showed us how far the wings we had would take us.

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

When the first American steps on the red dust of Mars, it's going to be because of computer scientists.

Fifty years after humans landed on the moon for the first time, America has driven a golden spike on the trail to new space exploration feats through the work of our commercial partner SpaceX and all of the dedicated and talented flight controllers at NASA and our international partners.

The moon landing was such a magnificent accomplishment in U.S. space history. I think that boots on the moon was just one indicator of the rapid technology advancement and really just showed what we can do when all of us are dedicated to a single goal over a long period of time.

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

Three decades ago, in a top story of the century, Americans placed six flags on the Moon. Today we no longer try for new and bold space achievements; instead, we celebrate the anniversaries of the past.

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.

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.

From the moment those images of Buzz and Neil arrived on the world's television sets, our human space program has been lost - for a blatantly simple and obvious reason - after the first giant leap to take that first small step, there was no plan for the next one, because there was no second question to be answered.