Space Quotes Page | Historic Spacecraft (2024)

Wernher von Braun Quotes

"One test result is worth one thousand expert opinions." Wernher von Braun

"A human being is the best computer available to place in a spacecraft. . . It is also the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor." Werner von Braun

"Our two greatest problems are gravity and paper work. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming." Werner von Braun

"I only hope that we shall not wait to adopt the program until after our astronomers have reported a new and unsuspected aster[oid] moving across their fields of vision with menacing speed. At that point it will be too late!" Wernher von Braun, 1953

"Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go - and he'll do plenty well when he gets there." Wernher von Braun, 1958

"It [the rocket] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven." Wernher von Braun

"My friends there was dancing here in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the earth. There was dancing again when the first Americans landed on the moon. I'd like to ask you, don't hang up your dancing slippers." Wernher von Braun

Alan Shepherd Quotes

"Unfortunately the suit is so stiff, I can't do that with two hands, but I'm going to try a little sand trap shot here." Alan Shepard, Apollo 14, golfing on the Moon, 6 February 1971.

"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." Alan Shepherd

"Why don't you fix your little problem and light this candle?" Alan B. Shepard Jr.

Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

"Remember this: once the human race is established on more than one planet and especially, in more than one solar system, there is no way now imaginable to kill off the human race." Robert Heinlein, 1961

"Earth is too small a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in." Robert A. Heinlein

John F. Kennedy Quotes

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project...will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important...and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish..." President John F. Kennedy

"We believe that when men reach beyond this planet, they should leave their national differences behind them." President John F. Kennedy, 1962.

"We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.President John F. Kennedy

"... the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward, and so will space." President John F. Kennedy, 1962.

"But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?" President John F. Kennedy, 1962.

Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

"It's too bad, but the way American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away." L.B. Johnson

"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." President Lyndon B. Johnson

Ronald Reagan Quotes

"Our nation is indeed fortunate that we can still draw on an immense reservoir of courage, character, and fortitude, that we are still blessed with heroes like those of the space shuttle Challenger. Man will continue his conquest of space. To reach out for new goals and ever-greater achievements, that is the way we shall commemorate our seven Challenger heroes." President Ronald Reagan

Robert Goddard Quotes

"The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow" Robert Goddard

Isaac Asimov Quotes

"The world is being Americanized and technologized to its limits, and that makes it dull for some people. Reaching the Moon restores the frontier and gives us the lands beyond." Isaac Asimov

"There are so many benefits to be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve for 50,000 years?" Isaac Asimov

Other Space Quotes

"I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go." Captain Cook

"The Soviet Union has become the seacoast of the universe." Sergei Korolev

"It is conceivable that some great unexpected mass of matter should presently rush upon us out of space, whirl sun and planets aside like dead leaves before the breeze, and collide with and utterly destroy every spark of life upon this earth... It is conceivable, too, that some pestilence may presently appear, some new disease, that will destroy not 10 or 15 or 20 per cent of the earth's inhabitants as pestilences have done in the past, but 100 per cent, and so end our race... And finally there is the reasonable certainty that this sun of ours must some day radiate itself toward extinction... There surely man must end. That of all such nightmares is the most insistently convincing. And yet one doesn't believe it. At least I do not. And I do not believe in these things because I have come to believe in certain other things--in the coherency and purpose in the world and in the greatness of human destiny. Worlds may freeze and suns may perish, but there stirs something within us now that can never die again. H. G. Wells, 1902

"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge." Carl Sagan

"The flight was extremely normal . . . for the first 36 seconds then after that got very interesting". Pete Conrad, Apollo 12 commander