Quotes & Sayings About Space Program

By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface. — Buzz Aldrin

Three years after the United States ended the space shuttle program, the American space agency today announced the return of "human space flight to U.S. soil." NASA has chosen two spaceships, the Boeing CST-100 and SpaceX Dragon version 2, to bring American astronauts to the International Space Station. The program will cost $6.8 billion. — Anonymous

Having the benefit to our society, not only here in the United States but throughout the world with the amount of invention you get from having a space program, is well worth the risk that an individual like myself has to take by flying in the vehicle. — Mark Kelly

Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid. — Nathan Myhrvold

Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy. — Ken Hollings

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed.
Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have. — George Alec Effinger

And now the sound comes toward us: bassy, crackly, like a fireworks display that never lets up. The sound goes right through you, and if you have become too emotionally involved in the space program, this sound will make you cry. It's the sound of American exploration, the sound of missiles put to better use than killing or threatening to kill, a sound that means we came in peace for all mankind. — Margaret Lazarus Dean

The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote. — Phil Plait

Putting a man in space is a stunt: the man can do no more than an instrument, in fact can do less. There are far more serious things to do than indulge in stunts ... I do not discard completely the value of demonstrating to the world our skills. Nor do I undervalue the effect on morale of the spectacular. But the present hullabaloo on the propaganda aspects of the program leaves me entirely cool. — Vannevar Bush

Anybody who grew up with the space program is a fan of science fiction. — Bill Nye

And while the black women are the most hidden of the mathematicians who worked at the NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later at NASA, they were not sitting alone in the shadows: the white women who made up the majority of Langley's computing workforce over the years have hardly been recognized for their contributions to the agency's long-term success. Virginia Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily Press newspaper, covering the space program starting in 1958. "Everyone said, 'This is a scientist, this is an engineer,' and it was always a man," she said in a 1990 panel on Langley's human computers. She never got to meet any of the women. "I just assumed they were all secretaries," she said. Five — Margot Lee Shetterly

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. — Gus Grissom

On a visit to the space program, President Kennedy asked me about the satellite. I told him that it would be more important than sending a man into space. "Why?" he asked. "Because," I said, "this satellite will send ideas into space, and ideas last longer than men. — Newton N. Minow

I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard. — Bill Bryson

Having three operational vehicles in the fleet affords the shuttle program great schedule flexibility as we move toward flying safely and completing the international space station. — Wayne Hale

Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again. — Carl Sagan

Muslim students would go through a bunch of feel-good exercises and leave with the impression that without Islamic contributions to science, there would be no U.S. space program. — Brad Thor

The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species. — Warren Ellis

My expertise is the space program and what it should be in the future based on my experience of looking at the transitions that we've made between pre-Sputnik days and getting to the moon. — Buzz Aldrin

Space exploration is important research to our economic and national defense, and America's space program is a symbol of our success as a scientifically and technologically advanced nation. — Randy Forbes

When I was a kid, I was a bit of a space geek. I loved the space program and all things NASA. I would read books about our solar system; I had pictures of the Space Shuttle on my bedroom wall. And yes, I even went to Space Camp. — Simon Sinek

The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars ... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space. — Arthur C. Clarke

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. — Mark Kelly

There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further. — Wernher Von Braun

I'm always involved with the Aerospace Program and NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center. And if kids feel so inclined, they can log onto NASA and the Optimus Prime Spinoff Award, which we present every year to some of the brilliant young minds that are taking up into the academics of space, science, technology, math. — Peter Cullen

Light-years away, another starship was also experiencing problems, though perhaps not as severe. The I.S.S. Antares was not a new ship either. Many older ships in the imperial space fleet reaching retirement age were being refitted with more modern equipment to extend their useful lives. Thus, technologically at least, Antares was currently one of the most advanced ships of the Imperial Space Fleet. Unfortunately, she was now also one of the most troubled. This is what the Phoenix refitting program had done to the Antares. — Christina Engela

Another principle that I believe can be justified by scientific evidence so far is that nobody is going to emigrate from this planet not ever ... It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. The technology is already well along ... the real thrill will be in learning in detail what is out there ... It is an especially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet ... Earth, by the twenty-second century, can be turned, if we so wish, into a permanent paradise for human beings ... — Edward O. Wilson

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. — Wernher Von Braun

I think in the long run the money that s been put into the space program is one of the best investments this country has ever made ... This is a downpayment on the future of mankind. It's as simple as that. — Arthur C. Clarke

I believe we can do more in making the President's vision for space exploration a reality by awarding cash prizes to encourage greater participation of the private sector in the national space program. — Dana Rohrabacher

I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut. — Alfonso Cuaron

The moon is considered a relatively easy object to land humans on, everything else is much harder by orders of magnitude. It is the reason why we have not been to Mars and will likely never go there successfully with humans. — Steven Magee

With today's work, I'm about one-fourth of the way through the whole cut. At least, one-fourth of the way through the drilling. Then I'll have 759 little chunks to chisel out. And I'm not sure how well carbon composite is going to take that. But NASA'll do it a thousand times back on Earth and tell me the best way to get it done. — Andy Weir

No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents. — Sally Ride

Growing up in the '60s and early '70s, with the space flight and the Apollo program, I always loved planes. I always loved rockets and I always loved space travel. — Stewart O'Nan

President Obama has outsourced a major portion of the U.S. space program to the Russians. That's national policy. Taxpayer money. So let's stop playing games with this outsourcing distortion and talk about the fact that when we need is a president that knows how to manage big enterprise and create jobs. — John Sununu

Although as a boy I had dreamed about going into space, I had completely forgotten about that until one day I received a call from an astronaut, who suggested that I should join the program. — David M. Brown

There's a latter-day notion that artsy hippie types in the 1960s disdained the space program. Not in my experience they didn't. We watched, transfixed with reverence, not even making rude remarks about President Nixon during his phone call to the astronauts. — Patrick Nielsen Hayden

We used to joke about canned men, putting people in a can and seeing how far you can send them and bring them back. That's not the purpose of this program ... Space is a laboratory, and we go into it to work and learn the new. — John Glenn

What got my interested in science fiction was actually the American space program. — Ronald D. Moore

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program. — Kevin J. Anderson

If we die, do not mourn for us. This is a risky business we're in, and we accept those risks. The space program is too valuable to this country to be halted for too long if a disaster should ever happen. — Gus Grissom

The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, 'Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.' Which is a non-thought. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad. — David R. Brower

The powered flight took a total of about eight and a half minutes. It seemed to me it had gone by in a lash. We had gone from sitting still on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center to traveling at 17,500 miles an hour in that eight and a half minutes. It is still mind-boggling to me. I recall making some statement on the air-to-ground radio for the benefit of my fellow astronauts, who had also been in the program a long time, that it was well worth the wait. — Robert Crippen

Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible. — Edsger Dijkstra

Histories of the Kennedy Space Center acknowledge without exaggeration that the obstacle posed by the mosquitoes was so serious that NASA quite literally could not have put a man on the moon by Kennedy's "before the decade is out" deadline without the invention of DDT. In this way, the challenges of spaceflight reveal themselves to be distinctly terrestrial. — Margaret Lazarus Dean

'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. — Buzz Aldrin

In the space shuttle program, where we had males and females, I can tell you that nobody was doing that [sex] because there's absolutely no privacy. The only privacy would have been in the air lock, but everybody would know what you were doing. You're not out there doing a spacewalk. There's no reason to be in there. — Mike Mullane

I stayed in the astronaut program until 1993. People ask me why I left. I thought I had a lot of things to contribute that would be difficult to do if I stayed. I thought I could have a stronger voice as an advocate for space exploration. So I ended up starting my own technology consulting company. — Mae Jemison

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The space program is not only scientific in purpose but also is an expression of man's insistent determination to do the nearly impossible - to explore the unknown, even at great risk. — Harold Urey

I believe that space travel will one day become as common as airline travel is today. I'm convinced, however, that the true future of space travel does not lie with government agencies
NASA is still obsessed with the idea that the primary purpose of the space program is science
but real progress will come from private companies competing to provide the ultimate adventure ride, and NASA will receive the trickle-down benefits. — Buzz Aldrin

You see countries like India really investing in their space program because they see it as inspirational and good for their economy. — Ellen Stofan

The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program. — Sally Ride

We collectively have a special place in our heart for the manned space flight program - Apollo nostalgia is one element, but that is only part of it. American culture worships explorers - look at the fame of Lewis and Clark, for example. The American people want to think of themselves as supporting exploration. — Nathan Myhrvold

NASA is moving the space program to Starkville because it has no atmosphere. — Skip Bertman

We need a space program because we need explorers. Its in our souls. — Corbin Bernsen

If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what's going on up there in the space program, then my job's been done. — Christa McAuliffe

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right! — Larry Niven

I will have a one-hour program called the Mission Watch, where I will describe details of the mission and give additional information about the lessons from space. — Christa McAuliffe

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Benedict's spending down his energy was a function of his fighting against the Space/Information Age's relentless pressure on the concept of hierarchy, the restoration of which he had, following John Paul II, made a central part of the program that has come to be known as the reform of the reform. — Eugene Kennedy

As a member of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, I am a firm believer in the American space program. — Randy Forbes

In less than 70 hours, three astronauts will be launched on the flight of Apollo 8 from the Cape Kennedy Space Center on a research journey to circle the moon. This will involve known risks of great magnitude and probable risks which have not been foreseen. Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1.5 million systems, subsystems and assemblies. With 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects. Hence the striving for perfection and the use of redundancy which characterize the Apollo program. — Jerome F. Lederer

Ideally, the ISS program will just be one more incremental step on an expanding, incredible journal of exploration and understanding, taking us higher and farther. — Ron Garan

But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program. — Sally Ride

I think both the space shuttle program and the International Space Station program have not really lived up to their expectations. — Buzz Aldrin

I believe that the manned space program can engage the public by advancing the space frontier. Every next mission takes you farther out in space than you were before, either technologically or in terms of distance. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The U.S.A. was outraged, and loudly said so to everyone, whether they would listen or not. But there wasn't much America could do about it, having sacrificed our space program on the altars of economic necessity and eternal war. — Elizabeth Bear

If you could really guarantee that the money would be spent on something more worthwhile, I'd say, absolutely, scrap the space program, but it never works that way. — Mary Roach

To use a Southern euphemism, our space program has been snake-bit. — Al Gore

If I could get one message to you it would be this: the future of this country and the welfare of the free world depends upon our success in space. There is no room in this country for any but a fully cooperative, urgently motivated all-out effort toward space leadership. No one person, no one company, no one government agency, has a monopoly on the competence, the missions, or the requirements for the space program. — Lyndon B. Johnson

If someone asked me to sum up what is great about my country, I would probably tell them about Apollo 11, about the four hundred thousand people who worked to make the impossible come true within eight years, about how it changed me to see the space-scarred Columbia capsule in a museum as a child, about how we came in peace for all mankind. — Margaret Lazarus Dean

With his deeds, not only words, President Obama has revitalized our struggling space program. — Buzz Aldrin

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

You've got to stop and ask yourself once in a while ... why some asinine politicians would quicker cut out social security than the space program ... Go figure. — Timothy Pina

The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction. — Gregory Benford

For them not to have fucked then and there would have required such a reversal of the laws of nature as to cause Newton to spin in his coffin and NASA to discontinue the space program. — Tom Robbins

I would not say that female cosmonauts are not welcomed in the Russian space program. I must say, however, that all spaceflight hardware, including spacesuits and spacecraft comfort assuring systems, were designed mostly by men and for men. — Valentina Tereshkova

When Isaac Newton embarked on his great program, he encountered a fundamental lack of definition where it was most needed. He began with a semantic sleight of hand: "I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all," he wrote deceptively. Defining these words was his very purpose. There were no agreed standards for weights and measures. Weight and measure were themselves vague terms. Latin seemed more reliable than English, precisely because it was less worn by everyday use, but the Romans had not possessed the necessary words either. — James Gleick

Our goal is to show that you can develop a robust, safe manned space program and do it at an extremely low cost. — Burt Rutan

The views of the Earth are really beautiful. If you've ever seen a space IMAX movie, that's really what it looks like. I wish I'd had more time just to sit and look out the window with a map, but our science program kept us very busy in the lab most of the time. — David M. Brown

I've always loved airplanes and flight. The space program was really important to me as a kid. I still have a photo of Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon in my living room. — Bill Nye

A sense of the unknown has always lured mankind and the greatest of the unknowns of today is outer space. The terrors, the joys and the sense of accomplishment are epitomized in the space program. — William Shatner

College football is no more of a minor league than, say, the universities' schools of journalism, engineering or music are. We can argue at another time whether football should occupy the same space on campus as those disciplines, but for now, it does. The critical point is that a coach is less concerned with preparing athletes for the next level than he is with molding them to fit a system that helps him win games, keep his job and, eventually, move on to a position with a more prestigious program. — William C. Rhoden

The space program caused so much future-thinking in culture. People who couldn't go to the Moon were building space-fantasy chairs and corsets and hairdos and anything that they could put their hands on. — Aleksandra Mir

One of the great intellectual mistakes Einstein made is that he thought that space and time are physically or ontologically entangled. In the present non-spatial universal computational program, space and time happen to be entangled to the extent that, under certain unique circumstances, changes in spatial measurements indicate changes in temporal ones. However, a change in the program itself may cause space and time to disentangle. — Kedar Joshi

women could never be in the space program, since in zero G a woman's breasts would bounce and keep the men from concentrating. — Julie Phillips

Being transgender guarantees you will upset someone. People get upset with transgender people who choose to inhabit a third gender space rather than "pick a side." Some get upset at transgender people who do not eschew their birth histories. Others get up in arms with those who opted out of surgical options, instead living with their original equipment. Ire is raised at those who transition, then transition again when they decide that their initial change was not the right answer for them. Heck, some get their dander up simply because this or that transgender person simply is not "trying hard enough" to be a particular gender, whatever that means. Some are irked that the Logo program RuPaul's Drag Race shows a version of transgender life different from their own. Meanwhile, all around are those who have decided they aren't comfortable with the lot of us, because we dared to change from one gender expression or identity to some other. — Kate Bornstein

Since Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard's epoch flights in 1961, all space missions have been flown only under large, expensive government efforts. By contrast, our program involves a few, dedicated individuals who are focused entirely on making spaceflight affordable. — Burt Rutan

Maybe the purpose of the space program [NASA] is to prepare the world for Big Brother - the New World Order. — Kent Hovind

If leaders in the space program had at its beginning in the 1940s, pointed out the benefits to people on earth rather than emphasizing the search for proof of evolution in space, the program would have saved $100 billion in tax money and achieved greater results. — Walter Lang

NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world's premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget. — Bill Nye

Every crew brings its own small, tethered "g meter", a toy or figurine we hang in front of us so we know when we are weightless. Ours was Klyopa, a small knitted doll based on a character in a Russian children's television program, courtesy of Anastasia, Roman's 9-year-old daughter. When the string that was holding her suddenly slackened and she began to drift upward, I had a feeling I'd never felt before in space: I'd come home. — Chris Hadfield

The American civil space program is growing to maturity. It has passed through the joys and crises of precocious childhood and now is being called upon to do grown-up things, like earn a living and establish permanent roots in space. — John Noble Wilford

You can't be on the cusp of innovation and at the forefront of technology if you're wearing blinders. If you don't have an exploration program where you're exploring your world here on Earth, underwater, and in space, then you're wearing blinders and handicapping yourself. — Gwynne Shotwell

I have a seven-level program and through even into the fifth level it can be all done from a distance. "Why not?" is how I feel about it, because energy is not confined by time or space, so why should my teaching be. I'm teaching energy and how to manage it, how to handle it, and how to heal with it. — Deborah King

I'm hoping that the suspension of the space program is just that, a suspension, and that it's not the final say in the matter, because I think we need it. — Jonathan Nolan

Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it. — Wynton Marsalis