Quotes About NASA

On Sunday August 5, 2012, I was among a group of people who witnessed the Rover landing on Mars in real time at NASA's Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

We need to be very thoughtful about how we propose to spend the money that NASA does have for space exploration. And we need to be clear that there's the human spaceflight part of NASA, and there's the science space part of NASA, and there's also aeronautics. Those are all very different things that NASA does.

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.

NASA is increasingly not the future of space exploration. I love the fact that we have private sector folks devoting a lot of money to stimulate innovation in space technology.

After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

NASA scientists have discovered a new form of life, unfortunately, it won't date them either.

When NASA started sending up astronauts, they discovered that ballpoint pens don't work in zero gravity. So they spent twelve million dollars and more than a decade developing a pen that writes under any condition, on almost every surface. The Russians used a pencil.

From its earliest days, NASA had followed a policy of maximum, though prudent, disclosure. We had to do everything openly—and soon under intensive, live TV coverage.

Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.

I am humbled and excited by new opportunities for me to support and share the amazing work NASA is doing to help us travel farther into the solar system and work with the next generation of science and technology leaders.

Instead of planning the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, America should be preparing the shuttles for their next step in space: evolving, not shutting them down and laying off thousands of people.

It has only been within my lifetime that asteroids have been considered a credible threat to our planet. And since then, there's been a focused effort underway to discover and catalog these objects. I am lucky enough to be part of this effort. I'm part of a team of scientists that use NASA's NEOWISE telescope.

After earning my university degrees and working for a few years, I wrote to NASA to request an application package. Seven months later, after I applied, I received a call inviting me to Houston to interview. That itself was thrilling; it meant that I was one of the 100 or so who would be interviewed, chosen from several thousand applicants.

A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.

My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research.

NASA sent up two satellites in '77, and on board both they packed golden records in case the satellite should ever encounter someone who might want to listen.

Culture change takes time, and NASA's culture is definitely improving. Based on its success, the change method is now being taken to each center agency-wide.

It's been said that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there the last time.

In their place the Americans arrived, and NASA decided to use the airfield as an emergency landing strip for the space shuttle, apparently paying something like £30 million per year in rent. Yusuf could see that I looked completely disbelieving. 'It's true!' he said with a smile. 'It was just in case the shuttle had trouble on re-entry and couldn't make it around the planet and back to the US. You see, we have more surprises to share with you, Simon.

Outwardly, she did not lack self-confidence. Only she knew how frightened and vulnerable she was beneath it all. It was her secret-one she kept so well that she fooled one of the NASA psychologists into giving her command of a ship.

I've been receiving a lot of emails and messages from folks that say, 'Hey, my kid saw you and they're so excited and it's great that he can look at the NASA TV broadcast and see someone that looks like him,' and I think that's important.

For long-duration exploration missions, NASA is looking for folks with a lot of operational, hands-on experience, people who have been in field-type situations such as military deployments. In my case, I worked in the Congo and in Biosafety Level 4 labs on smallpox.

Our country... invests a tiny fraction of 1 percent in NASA, and this is what's so amazing to me, is with that small investment, we do so much for the country.