Top 827 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Astronauts - Page 4

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.

The greatest enemy of progress is the illusion of knowledge.

For the last several years and culminating in six months in orbit next year, I've been training for my third space flight. This one is almost in a category completely different than the previous two, specifically to live in on the space station for six months, to command a space ship and to fly a new rocket ship.

Our generation may stand at a crucial breakpoint in history, for we in the presently affluent nations may be the last who can afford to open up the high frontier. What we do during the next ten or twenty years may determine whether future generations will live in a humane and rewarding society, or whether they will spend their lives in desperate contention for the dwindling sustenance afforded by our limited terrestrial resources.

As much as we've enjoyed it up here, we're also starting to look forward to seeing all the people back on Earth that we miss and love so much.

Don't let that hunger for the unknown go away. That curiosity is so important, so you should maintain that passion for what you do.

I was influenced by many, many different people in my student years, and I was always, I guess, immersed in a Navy environment, and so, obviously, that had a big impact when I decided what I wanted to do was go and be a Navy pilot. I was very familiar with the Navy community and felt very comfortable with it.

The flight was extremely normal... for the first 36 seconds then after that got very interesting.

I don't go along with going to Moon first to build a launch pad to go to Mars. We should go to Mars from Earth orbit. We have already been to the Moon; we've already practiced.

Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.

You're on your way, Jose!

Living inside the shuttle was a little like camping out. We ended up sleeping in our seats. You had to pay attention to housekeeping, not get things too dirty.

To see the Earth below you when we could take a break... to appreciate the environment around us was very special.

But I found that being an artist and doing accurate work is very difficult.

Being outside during the space walk, the view of the Earth is just spectacular, and getting a chance to do that is just unbelievable, everything about it. You are going around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, so you have 45 minutes of sunlight followed by 45 minutes of darkness. You do a lap every 90 minutes.

When the guys come back in from the spacewalk, there really is a distinct smell of space; it's something I will never forget.

I worked for some very good people who have helped me along the way and actually enabled me to have the opportunity to be selected to join the Astronaut Corps.

As you look back at your life, there are just a million different things that have happened, just in the right way, to allow you to make your dreams come true. And you know, someone has all that under control.

It was a cherished experience. I feel I got the chance to see the inner workings of the grand order of things. In the overall scheme of things, it proves that men can do about anything they want to if they work hard enough at it, and I knew that I could do it . . . and that leads, of course, to a strong suspicion that everybody else can do it if they want to.

Thank you for the confidence put in my by the motherland and the people, for giving me this chance to represent China's millions of women by going into space.

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

It's like trying to describe what you feel when you're standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon or remembering your first love or the birth of your child. You have to be there to really know what it's like.

Having serious consequences to your decision-making process is something you have to be very comfortable with. It's something you learn and you practise over time, so I encourage people to find some way to challenge themselves. The other thing I share with people, which I've learned over time, is self-confidence. You have to get very comfortable with saying, "Well, every day, I'm just going to give my best. I have skill sets I've learned, I'm going to employ them, and my best is going to be good enough".

We were only on orbit a little over two days, so we had no adverse effects from being weightless.

We'd like to have immediate answers to all of our questions. I think medicine in particular. I found it frustrating as a physician sometimes to not be able to tell someone exactly why something was happening to them. There are still so many mysteries in medicine.

I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.

This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It's lonely. It's small. It's isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we've got.

[The Moon] was a sobering sight, but it didn't have the impact on me, at least, as the view of the Earth did.

The biggest technical challenge to sending astronauts on farther and longer missions is biomedical: How do we keep them healthy?

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.

Usually, if you stop for tea, someone will feel the desire to join you.

The thing I remember most about space is the view from the spacewalk. When I was inside the space shuttle and looking through the window, you can see the earth and the stars, and it's very beautiful, but it's like looking at an aquarium, sort of. When you go outside and spacewalk, you become a scuba diver.

It was just really, really tough getting anything when you were a female. Basically, I just took advantage of everything I could. But when people are going to flat out tell you they're not going to hire anyone that's female, there's not much you can do about it.

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.

They don't hand out Ph.D.s in test piloting, but you pick up a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge along the way. After all, when you take up a brand new plane and put it through its paces to see if it will hang together, you are really flying somebody's theory.

Usually, girls weren't encouraged to go to college and major in math and science. My high school calculus teacher, Ms. Paz Jensen, made math appealing and motivated me to continue studying it in college.

The more we learn about the wonders of our universe, the more clearly we are going to perceive the hand of God.

The only time I had what you would call life-threatening fear was when I was on the Moon. Towards the end of our stay, we got excited and we were going to do the high jump, and I jumped and fell over backwards. That was a scary time, because if the backpack got broken, I would have had it. But everything held together.

Polytechnique is a school whose multidisciplinary, very high scientific level curriculum is invaluable.

It's a vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone. And it certainly does not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work.

It was just using the liquid shampoo - the Russians have one very similar to the stuff we use on the Shuttle - you just wet your hair with it and then wipe it out.

And, one thing I definitely enjoyed personally, from a selfish point of view, was exploration and going to places that I had never been to before and learning, you know, meeting the people and getting to know, new sights and sounds, etc.

All of us know today the value of communications satellites, weather satellites, resources satellites, etc.

The training flow for the space station is a year-and-a-half to two years.

I don't think of myself as being a woman and having anything to prove.

When we do things that are really hard, we can achieve great things - and that has worked as a great model for me.

My first inclination was toward flying and being a pilot.

My job during the EVAs, the spacewalks, is to act as the inside coordinator. I remain on the aft flight deck of the shuttle, and I act in a manner to help the gentlemen outside, my fellow crewmates, who are performing the EVA tasks.

The Theory of Groups is a branch of mathematics in which one does something to something and then compares the result with the result obtained from doing the same thing to something else, or something else to the same thing.

In the 19th Century people were looking for the Northwest Passage. Ships were lost and brave people were killed, but that doesn't mean we never went back to that part of the world again, and I consider it the same in space exploration.

My biggest emotion on Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank explosion was disappointment that we had lost the landing.

Astronauts cannot pick their nicknames and can only get their nicknames from other astronauts. Any astronaut who tries to give himself a cool nickname will regret it by getting just the opposite from his astronaut friends.

I felt so free in space, flying around and unrestrained by any social relationships, but my life since has changed a lot. Now I am extra-careful about what I say and do because everyone recognises me.

We thought our careers as cosmonauts - we were young then - would end with a flight to Mars. But, you see, life has made some course corrections.

When you're on one of the Caribbean islands, sometimes it's hard to picture how they fit in with the rest, but when you see them all joined together like a necklace from space, you see the natural geographic connectedness of them all.

Yes, we have ruined the Earth and have done an exceptionally good job of it. Yes, we should look at sustainable development. But we cannot afford to do things sequentially, but parallelly and make sure that we do not repeat our mistakes.

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.

We spend our spare time taking care of little things. I can watch a little bit of college and professional football if I want to... Our favorite pastime is trying to take pictures of our hometowns from space.

I try to be the best husband and father I possibly can. And it doesn't mean I get to spend as much time with my family as I'd like, but I do the best I can. Even if you do get to be an astronaut and get to go and do a lot of interesting things, at some point that will come to an end. If in the process you short change your family or compromise your values along the way, when you get through on the other side, it won't really be worth it. At least not to me.

After the urine is collected over a couple of days, it's dumped into space, which is beautiful to watch because the urine freezes into a glitter of ice crystals shimmering in the sun.