Spacecraft Quotes & Sayings

To try to really land a spacecraft really on another world is really difficult, and if we lose that ability, it's going to be heartbreaking. — Bill Nye

I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting. — Lewis Thomas

REENTERING SPACECRAFT HEAT UP because they're compressing the air in front of them (not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction). — Randall Munroe

All right," Malcolm said. "Let's go back to the beginning." He paused, staring at the ceiling. "Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for hundreds of years." "Okay," Gennaro said. "But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They're hard to solve - in fact, they're usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory. — Michael Crichton

I left Aerospace because I wanted to go build, and put spacecraft together. — Gwynne Shotwell

Standing on the left side of the runway was my battle-worn X-wing fighter. Parked on the right side was my DeLorean. Sitting on the runway itself was my most frequently used spacecraft, the Vonnegut. Max had already powered up the engines, and they emitted a low, steady roar that filled the hangar. The Vonnegut was a heavily modified Firefly-class transport vessel, modeled after the Serenity in the classic Firefly TV series. The ship had been named the Kaylee when I'd first obtained it, but I'd immediately rechristened it after one of my favorite twentieth-century novelists. Its new name was stenciled on the side of its battered gray hull. I'd looted the Vonnegut from a cadre of Oviraptor clansmen who had foolishly attempted to hijack my X-wing while I was cruising through a large group of worlds in Sector Eleven known as the Whedonverse. The — Ernest Cline

The evidence is overwhelming that Planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. In other words, SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. Most are not. It's clear from the Opinion Polls and my own experience, that indeed most people accept the notion that SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. The greater the education, the MORE likely to accept this proposition — Stanton T. Friedman

Apart from a thin film of life at the very surface of the Earth, an occasional intrepid spacecraft, and some radio static, our impact on the Universe is nil. It knows nothing of us. — Carl Sagan

For most of the time carrier aviation is more challenging than flying in a spacecraft — Jim Lovell

For the industry we're starting now, for suborbital flight, there is no destination, so the spacecraft you go up in has to be large and spacious. That's why SpaceShipTwo is much bigger than SpaceShipOne: It needs to be because you want those six people to be floating around and enjoying themselves. — Burt Rutan

With the geosynchronous orbit, the RAE Table maxes out. It has two answers for the orbital lifetime of a spacecraft in GSO: "greater than a million years" and "indefinite. — Trevor Paglen

I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know. — William J. Clinton

The Mars settlement may not grow that quickly, although the length of a sea voyage cross the Atlantic in the 1600's is comparable to the time it will take people to get to Mars on a spacecraft, and the cost, in relative terms, is not that different. — Stephen L. Petranek

I don't think we're going to build a 50-person spacecraft or a 100-person spacecraft. — Buzz Aldrin

Space has not changed but technology has, in many cases, improved dramatically. A good example is digital technology where today's cell phones are far more powerful than the computers on the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module that we used to navigate to the moon and operate all the spacecraft control systems. — Neil Armstrong

Dr. Lecter would have more sustenance on the spacecraft from Alien because there are more people to eat. I think he'd get hungry after a while in the Overlook - I can't imagine him eating canned food. — Bryan Fuller

By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. So we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow and I expect to be around in see it. — Barack Obama

Her belly was beginning to complain with hunger, and she had to imagine that the others were feeling the same. They were holding the bridge of the largest spacecraft humanity had ever built, trapped in the starless dark by an alien power they barely began to comprehend, but they were still constrained by the petty needs of flesh, and their collective blood sugar was getting pretty low. — James S.A. Corey

The time will come when a spacecraft carrying human beings will leave the earth and set out on a voyage to distant planets - to remote worlds. Today this may seem only an enticing fantasy, but such in fact is not the case. The launching of the first two Soviet Sputniks has already thrown a sturdy bridge from the earth into space, and the way to the stars is open — Sergei Korolev

A hybrid human-robot mission to investigate an asteroid affords a realistic opportunity to demonstrate new technological capabilities for future deep-space travel and to test spacecraft for long-duration spaceflight. — Buzz Aldrin

The winners in life treat their body as if it were a magnificent spacecraft that gives them the finest transportation and endurance for their lives. — Denis Waitley

In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly. — Henry Spencer

You have to be there not for the fame and glory and recognition and being a page in a history book, but you have to be there because you believe your talent and ability can be applied effectively to operation of the spacecraft. — Alan Shepard

Each year, thousands of UFOs are sighted and reported, which is an impressive tally of unidentified aerial phenomena. Surveys show that roughly one-third of the populace believes that at least some of this sky show is due to extraterrestrial spacecraft, here to probe our airspace and, when that proves boring, our bodies. — Seth Shostak

There is a project that's underway called the interplanetary Internet. It's in operation between Earth and Mars. It's operating on the International Space Station. It's part of the spacecraft that's in orbit around the Sun that's rendezvoused with two planets. — Vint Cerf

The era during which only governments could put hardware on the Moon is coming to an end. There are 26 private teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize - to be awarded for sending a robotic spacecraft to this nearby world that can roam at least 500 meters, and send back data such as a photo. — Seth Shostak

It's easy to reckon that the oomph to hurl even a Smart Car-size spacecraft to another star at, say, 20 percent the speed of light (and land it when it arrives) is the energy contained in 50 billion gallons of gasoline. The tank's not big enough. — Seth Shostak

That place, called the heliopause, is one definition of the outer boundary of the Empire of the Sun. But the Voyager spacecraft will plunge on, penetrating the heliopause sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century, skimming through the ocean of space, never to enter another solar system, destined to wander through eternity far from the stellar islands and to complete its first circumnavigation of the massive center of the Milky Way a few hundred million years from now. We have embarked on epic voyages. — Carl Sagan

The fastest that human spacecraft are likely to achieve in the twenty-first century, I think, is 300 kilometres per second. — Kip S. Thorne

We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those craft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11. — Neil Armstrong

Me," Artemis blurted. "I'm the nut."
Artemis could have sworn the squid winked at him before bringing the five-ton chunk of spacecraft swinging down toward the morsel of meat in its blue shell.
"I'm the nut!" Artemis shouted again, a little hysterically, it must be said. — Eoin Colfer

We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. — Carl Sagan

I took a Russian class at Notre Dame. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would fly someday in a Russian spacecraft with two cosmonauts, speaking only Russian. — Kevin A. Ford

The Challenger was the first American spacecraft to carry astronauts but have no escape system. — Hugh Harris

MYTH506. | There is an American flag on the Moon. According to Buzz Aldrin, one of the astronauts who was on the Moon, he and Neil Armstrong accidentally placed the original American flag too close to their spacecraft, and when they took off, the flag was blown away. — John Brown

An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft. — Henry Spencer

Many people remember that when in 1977 the Voyager spacecraft was launched, opinions were canvassed as to what artefacts would be most appropriate to leave in outer space as a signal of man's cultural achievements on earth. The American astronomer Carl Sagan proposed that 'if we are to convey something of what humans are about then music has to be a part of it.' To Sagan's request for suggestions, the eminent biologist Lewis Thomas answered, 'I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.' After a pause, he added, 'But that would be boasting. — John Eliot Gardiner

The vast majority of the shuttle program was a success. We learned so much about how a reusable spacecraft interacts with its environment, how it ages-and what to design next time. — Eileen Collins

A lot of kids owned their own interplanetary vehicles. School parking lots all over Ludus were filled with UFOs, TIE fighters, old NASA space shuttles, Vipers from Battlestar Galactica, and other spacecraft designs lifted from every sci-fi movie and TV show you can think of. — Ernest Cline

The phrase 'contrary to all expectations' rings through the story of the progress of human knowledge. It was 'contrary to all expectations' that the Earth was found to revolve around the sun, and not the other way round, and that a mould growing in one of Dr. Alexander Fleming's dishes was found to be capable of destroying bacteria. When in 1989 the spacecraft Voyager 2 got close enough to the planet Naptune to take detailed pictures of the surface, they were 'contrary to all expectations'. — Anthony Terence Quincey Stewart

The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch. — Henry Spencer

We are dealing with a yet unrecognized level of consciousness, independent of man but closely linked to the earth ... I do not believe anymore that UFOs are simply the spacecraft of some race of extraterrestrial visitors. This notion is too simplistic to explain their appearance, the frequency of their manifestations through recorded history, and the structure of the information exchanged with them during contact. — Jacques Vallee

While landing a spacecraft on a planet via Skip Drive navigation was officially and strongly discouraged by the Colonial Union, the Colonial Defense Forces recognized the strategic value of sudden and unexpected arrivals. — John Scalzi

On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system. — Henry Spencer

Age can be wonderful for red wine, but not for spacecraft. — Nathan Myhrvold

There'll be a sky full of babies and their shit, suspended overhead. You do not want to get caught in that rain when it falls. — Stephen Baxter

It's called the flyby anomaly, because there are multiple instances where NASA's Galileo, NEAR, Pioneer 10, and Pioneer 11 spacecraft have experienced an unexplainable increase in speed over massive distances. It's always when they're passing Earth at enough of a distance to not be affected by its gravitational pull, yet they somehow pick up speed, like a universal force is inside stepping on the accelerator. — Anonymous

On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. It was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. — Buzz Aldrin

Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write. — Stephen Graham Jones

Q: What were you thinking when your colleagues were out there making cosmic history?
A: I just kept reminding myself that every single component in this spacecraft was provided by the guy who submitted the cheapest tender. — Michael Collins

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. — Edgar Mitchell

You could see the flames and the outer skin of the spacecraft glowing; and burning, baseball-size chunks flying off behind us. It was an eerie feeling, like being a gnat inside a blowtorch flame. — William Anders

It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth. — Rusty Schweickart

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world. — Nick Harkaway

I always see what's ... wrong. Would you want that? When I see a car or a rocket or spacecraft, I only see what's wrong. I never see what's right. It's not a recipe for happiness. — Elon Musk

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You're doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You're doing great, intellectuals! You're doing great. Much — Andrew Klavan

There are several multiple-witnessed events where humans have been taken on board spacecraft. — Steven M. Greer

On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges - curiosity. — David G. Wells

CSETI (The Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has in the past 18 months succeeded in intentionally establishing contact with extraterrestrial spacecraft, on two occasions at very close range, and with multiple witnesses present. — Steven M. Greer

It'll be the fastest spacecraft ever to Jupiter ... 13 months after launch. We pass the Moon in just nine hours. — Alan Stern

One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven't done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar. — Ridley Scott

Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane. — Henry Spencer

There are more than 100 first- and second- hand witnesses to the retrieval of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and at least four extraterrestrial bodies from a crash which occurred in July, 1947, 75 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico; written and videotaped testimony from several first-hand witnesses who are respected military officers have been obtained. — Steven M. Greer

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

There are hundreds of credible reports, many with multiple witnesses, of humanoids in association with landed spacecraft. — Steven M. Greer

Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past. — Brian Cox

You see tools and parts and my arm shoved inside a small spacecraft, and you really have to ask what I'm doing? — John Scalzi

I've never agreed with the conventional wisdom that 'actors are great liars.' If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be 'actors are terrible liars,' because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What's called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary. — Rob Lowe

When you're in a spacecraft, you need to know what things you can touch and what things you shouldn't touch! — Buzz Aldrin

Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier. — Alastair Reynolds

NASA wanted to assure its ability to examine the spacecraft in orbit for signs of damage. — Marc Garneau

There are hundreds of electromagnetic cases where spacecraft have been observed by police, military personnel and civilians to affect car engines, radios and other electric devices. — Steven M. Greer

I'm urging NASA to foster the development of what I call 'runway landers.' No, that's not the name of a high stakes gambler from Vegas. It's a type of spacecraft that flies to orbit like the retiring Shuttles but then glides to a landing like an airplane on a runway. Just like the Shuttles do. — Buzz Aldrin

The 'tail' of a comet, by the way, is a train of dust, but it is not streaming out behind the head of the comet as we might think. Instead, it is 'blown' by a stream of particles coming from the sun, which we call the solar wind. So the tail of the comet always points away from the sun, no matter which way the comet is travelling. There's an exciting proposal, once confined to science fiction stories but now being implemented by Japanese space engineers, to use the solar wind to propel spacecraft equipped with gigantic 'sails'. Like sailing yachts on the sea using real wind, solar wind space-yachts would theoretically provide a very economical way to travel to distant worlds. — Richard Dawkins

A spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there-a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle. — Gregg Easterbrook

There aren't many people who can say they've vandalized a three-billion-dollar spacecraft, but I'm one of them. — Andy Weir

This afforded an opportunity for a close encounter with Earth as it might appear to an alien spacecraft, and Carl Sagan proposed using this as a "control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft." The instruments detected the spectral signature of the chlorophyll from green plants, and signs of an obviously life-altered atmosphere. As Sagan and colleagues wrote in their paper "A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft" published in Nature, they found evidence of abundant gaseous oxygen, a widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum, and atmospheric methane — David Grinspoon

We have never denied that it is possible, indeed probable, that other forms of life, even intelligent life, exist in the universe. But this is different from the belief that we are now being visited by extraterrestrial beings in spacecraft, that they are abducting people, and the there is a vast government cover-up. — Paul Kurtz

The modern belief that highly advanced civilizations from other planets are visiting the Earth via spacecraft is a ruse. If real, they are beings created apart from the procreative processes established for life on Earth (Gen. 1). And since they are not direct creations of God Himself, their origins must be sought from other sources. — Jeffrey W. Mardis

The missing toothbrush was nothing compared with the fact that the spacecraft was orientated to ascend, not descend. I would have gone up and up instead of going back down to the ground. — Valentina Tereshkova

There are numerous daytime and night time photographs and videotapes of clearly non-human spacecraft from all over the world; these films and videotapes have been evaluated and deemed authentic by competent experts in optical physics and related fields. — Steven M. Greer

It is of course dangerous to set off an explosive device on a spacecraft. — Andy Weir

The path of a cosmonaut is not an easy, triumphant march to glory. You have to get to know the meaning not just of joy but also of grief, before being allowed in the spacecraft cabin. — Yuri Gagarin

I really do think of them as post-minimalist sculptures, inspired in large part by some very early spacecraft that NASA built. — Trevor Paglen

We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps. — Carl Sagan

Please join me in applauding the ESA - European Space Agency's historic efforts with the Rosetta Mission and landing a spacecraft on rotating comet. It may seem like a work of fiction, but it is very real, very impressive, and will help us to further uncover the mysteries surrounding the formation of the solar system. They made a beautiful short film using an imaginary landscape to illustrate today's historic feat. — Stephen Hawking

Being first outside the spacecraft would bring much more responsibility, and I really wasn't looking for that. — Buzz Aldrin

Tragically, there are none so prejudiced as those who are infected with the curse of "knowingness." A 1% solution of strychnine qualifies as mostly water, but has quite a different effect on the human system. The human organism is itself mostly a bag of water, but a bag of water could not build the pyramids or launch a spacecraft to the moon and return it to earth. — Mike McInnes

Humanity's first faster-than-light spacecraft crashed into Pluto and vaporised a significant portion of it. Oops.

Pluto's status as a planet had been a matter of contention since the early twenty-first century and had come close to starting the fourth world war at the beginning of the twenty-second century. Making it even smaller did absolutely nothing to help the situation, and humanity came five minutes, and one hasty phone call, from another world war. — L.G. Estrella

Going back to the moon is not visionary in restoring space leadership for America. Like its Apollo predecessor, it will prove to be a dead end littered with broken spacecraft, broken dreams and broken policies. — Buzz Aldrin

The very first experiments with building rockets and firing them off were carried out by students at Cal Tech in 1937, '38 and '39. And later these people put together these jet propulsion labs in Pasadena and wound up sending aircraft and spacecraft to the moon. So it all began very primitively with love. — Ray Bradbury

Only man is a narcissistic enough species to think that a highly evolved alien life force would travel across billions and billions of light-years- a group of aliens so intelligent, so insouciant, so utterly above it all, they feel no need whatsoever to equip their spacecraft with windows so that they can gaze out on all that celestial beauty-but then immediately upon landing, their first impulse is to get in some hick's ass with a flashlight. — Dennis Miller