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Quotes by Astronaut
"The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited."
100
"Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit."
54
"I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom."
48
"We also had to bring with us some desired scientific equipment over to the station as well as assemble new machines. For that, I had to conduct two space walks."
47
"It's a great view from here. I'm having the time of my life."
44
"I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises."
40
"Science was something that really caught my attention. It was something I really could sink my teeth into."
40
"Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10."
39
"I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67. That program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us."
39
"Once you've been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is."
38
"I woke up an hour before I was supposed to, and started going over the mental checklist: where do I go from here, what do I do? I don't remember eating anything at all, just going through the physical, getting into the suit. We practiced that so much, it was all rote."
38
"This is a day we have managed to avoid for a quarter of a century."
38
"If anything, the overriding emotion is gonna just be excitement."
37
"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."
37
"I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine."
36
"When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen."
36
"This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
36
"Kennedy had made a mess in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He had to do something to look good. The Apollo program of going to the Moon was quite a goal,."
36
"The last thing, and the only one that you cannot physically train for, is the psychological preparation."
36
"NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts - we wear those a lot - and NASA T-shirts."
34
"And everything stopped quite rapidly because I knew that nobody in Europe was able to go to space. It was the privilege of being either American or Russian."
34
"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."
34
"When you launch in a rocket, you're not really flying that rocket. You're just sort of hanging on."
34
"I saw the booster, not Sputnik, flying by, and I said, maybe this is the way we should be going, not just sitting back waiting for something to happen."
33
"We still have a lot of international partner modules that need to get up there to make it truly the international structure that it will be, and that's highly important; we need to get to where the crew size is bigger."
Will,
33
"As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don't know what they're saying."
33
"I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts."
32
"Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed."
32
"It's easy to sleep floating around - it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!"
32
"We wanted to be in great shape, we wanted to be able to cope with zero gravity, we wanted to be able to cope with accelerations and decelerations and so on. So all of us trained so that we were probably in the best physical condition we had ever been in up until that point."
32
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