Quotes About NASA

The first time I applied to be an astronaut, NASA turned me down. I was not a test pilot, they said, and at that time, NASA wanted only test pilots. Other people, no matter how bright or talented, need not apply. Sure, I was disappointed, but I was determined and I knew the sky was not the limit, so I applied again.

I believe that space travel will one day become as common as airline travel is today. I'm convinced, however, that the true future of space travel does not lie with government agencies -- NASA is still obsessed with the idea that the primary purpose of the space program is science -- but real progress will come from private companies competing to provide the ultimate adventure ride, and NASA will receive the trickle-down benefits.

NASA's Office of Commercial Exploration has been concerned about protecting the landing zones where humans first walked on the Moon, and one of my colleagues, ecologist Margaret Race, has been part of their deliberations.

The one period of glory in NASA was the first nine years when they weren't a bureaucracy yet... and they haven't gotten back to that excitement, that adventurism, and won't. So, I would take most of the NASA budget, and I would turn it into prizes for private sector.

We have a great NASA support team that uplinks the nightly news. And if we have favorite TV shows or movies or sporting events, they can uplink those too. We also have access to the Internet just like we would on the ground. We have email. And we video-conference with our families about once a week. We feel pretty connected up here.

I applied to NASA four times. And finally, they said, Wally, you know, we're sorry, but you don't have an engineering degree. I said, well, I'll get one.

The head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.

Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts.

In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and crashed down to Earth less than two minutes after takeoff. The cause of that crash, it turned out, was an inexpensive rubber O-ring in the booster rocket that had frozen on the launchpad the night before and failed catastrophically moments after takeoff.

Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No - actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.

When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.

NASA wanted to assure its ability to examine the spacecraft in orbit for signs of damage.

NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them.

Jump. A "rebounder" is a small trampoline you can use indoors to get your lymph to flow merrily gently down its stream without much effort (and it's a great way to burn calories, according to research from NASA). Utilizing the benefit of gravity, you can jump up and down or simply bounce your feet on the trampoline, and within a short time, your fluids are moved along four times faster than

The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the U.S.' 'other' space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992.

I remember in 1967, when there was that terrible fire on NASA's Apollo 1 rocket that killed three astronauts, my father made pure oxygen and we lit this tiny cup and burned it. Suddenly, we had an unbelievable jet and a fire. You just could see exactly what had happened.

In 1983, NASA invited Canada to fly three payload specialists, in part because we had contributed the robotic arm that is used on the shuttle.

This has been a really interesting journey, the seven years I've been at NASA, and it's been a real exercise personally and professionally, but also spiritually.

During the heat of the space race in the 1960s, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it needed a ballpoint pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of approximately $1 million US. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth. The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.

Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego.

In 1994, NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory detected something as unexpected as the Velas' discoveries: frequent flashes of gamma rays right near Earth's surface. They were sensibly dubbed "terrestrial gamma-ray flashes." Nuclear holocaust? No, as is evident from the fact that you're reading this sentence.

When Nichols was asked by NASA to be part of the publicity campaign to recruit astronauts, her insistence that the astronaut corps include members of all races and genders helped create the diversity of humans in space today.

I did not come to NASA to make history.

I don't think I could advocate for increasing NASA's budget by a factor of two or ten, because I want us to have good roads in our country. I want us to have good education in our country. And NASA's budget is part of a discretionary budget, and we can't make that bigger without taking away other things.