Space Flight Quotes

Man will not always stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.

As always, we prepare for all sorts of contingencies. And the first few days of the flight up until docking on Day 3 are all spent really in the rendezvous because we launch at a time that puts us in an optimal position to catch up to station.

I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain, the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. Like the late Erich von Holst, I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so!

There was a lot of light and a lot of rumbling and vibration, especially the first minute or minute-and-a-half. And then after about two minutes, when the solid rocket boosters separated, the ride got a lot smoother.

It is rash to set limits to the progress of science. A man who had maintained at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee that within fifty years one would fly the Atlantic in a matter of hours would have risked being certified and locked up; yet we have seen this happen, and in the circumstances I am not prepared to rule out with any confidence the possibility one day of journeys through space in vessels carrying supplies of food and oxygen to the moon and the nearer planets.

I've had a chance to fly a lot of different airplanes, but it was nothing like the shuttle ride.

Politicians and the government have become too interested in short-term gains. Of course, if you look at the direct financial returns in the short term, human space flight is expensive. But they need to look longer term.

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.

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.

I've put a lot of my life into making it possible to fly in space at all.

I would say keep supporting space flight, keep telling the public and the politicians why it's important to advance science and explore the galaxy. I encourage the Japanese to keep doing what they're doing.

We all have our levels of risk tolerance. People who have decided they want to go to space are going to go.

In space-flight terms, six landings on the moon back in the Sixties and Seventies doesn't mean much.

As far as entertainment, 'The Right Stuff' is a good movie. As far as a documentary of the early space days, which they purported it to be, it is not at all.

Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday.

I think that space flight is a condition of Nature that comes into effect when an intelligent species reaches the saturation point of its planetary habitat combined with a certain level of technological ability... I think it is a built-in gene-directed drive for the spreading of the species and its continuation.

Space flight's good for age; I have a lot less wrinkles up here. It's a good place to be as you get older.

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

I attended a big human space flight conference in Beijing and I was going as myself. And really, there weren't any NASA astronauts there, I was the only so-called American Astronaut there. We had astronauts from most of the other countries, certainly from Russia, from France, from Japan, several other countries, but it was a little bit odd because here we are at an international gathering of a lot of astronauts and I'm talking about somewhere upwards of 30 or so astronauts, and I'm the only American. And I wasn't even there in an official capacity.

We had 83 different space research projects on my last space flight in '98, and they covered the whole gamut.

Space travel will be like every other business. There will be competitors. . . . Thirty months from now, I'm confident we'll be flying people into space.

We're working on New Glenn, which is our orbital vehicle, but we have in our mind's eye an even bigger vehicle called New Armstrong.

One of the major problems with long-term deep space human flight is the requirement for radiation shielding.

To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage, single-handed, in an unprecedented duel with nature-could one dream of anything more?

A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.