Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.
I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space.
Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
Before we had airplanes and astronauts, we really thought that there was an actual place beyond the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. There was an actual place, and we could go above the clouds and find it there.
There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
I think humans will reach Mars, and I would like to see it happen in my lifetime.
In so many and such important ways, then, do the planets bear witness to the earth’s mobility.
Mining asteroids will ultimately benefit humanity on and off the Earth in a multitude of ways.
If you’re going to go to the moon, you don’t shoot the rocket right at the moon. You have to go at it obliquely.
I was a frustrated astronaut all my life. I grew up at a time when space seemed to have no boundaries, and lots of us presumed humans would be living on the moon and landing on Mars.
So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion – because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there’s not very much you can do.
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
One thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure.
For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.
Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.
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.
Mankind will not forever remain on Earth but, in the pursuit of light and space, will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space.
Those folks out in the space suits are going to be getting beat up.
I think it’s going to be a very important, unique data set in terms of measuring the behavior of your lower body in space and trying to figure out what we can do to preserve bone and muscle density.
The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.
