Quotes About Astronauts

By 1973, we had a space station, the Skylab, and we had multiple probes going up to planets. So, all this wonderful stuff happened in 10 to 15 years. About that time, there should have been enormous initiatives to make it affordable for people to fly in space, not just a handful of trained NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.

Most astronauts are very down-to-earth people. Many of us, three-quarters, have an engineering degree, and we have a very Cartesian, rational approach to things.

Mars missions will require up to three years in reduced gravity, so we need to make sure astronauts can not only survive but thrive as they move outward to explore this new world.

Throughout history, when societies have been faced with big challenges, they've put their best people on them. During the Space Race, American and Russian scientists, engineers, astronauts and cosmonauts pushed the bounds of what was possible and landed men on the moon.

Things felt pretty crazy on earth in 1969, but the cosmos was friendly. Astronauts had round-trip tickets; they got home.

The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.

Q: Dr. Ride, apart from the obvious differences, how do you assess the differences in men and women astronauts? A: Aside from the obvious differences, I don't think there are any. - Prime crew press conference, April 29, 1982

She came over and looked at the picture. Then she took my hand. You know what that feels like? Like what the astronauts will feel when they step onto the moon for the very first time.

Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.

Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight.

Almost any seat was comfortable at one-sixth of a gravity.

Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world.

My dad and my mom convinced me to go into biomedical engineering because they said astronauts going to Mars will need life support systems.

Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot, was another sort of man altogether. A lot of the guys didn't care much for Buzz personally. He got on people's nerves and seemed to have an inordinate fascination with his own ideas and abilities. Frank Borman had made it clear to pretty much everyone that he didn't want Buzz on any of his crews. No doubt Buzz was a smart guy, with a doctorate in space rendezvous from MIT, but he thought he was smarter than he really was.

The answer was a big NO! In zero gravity, as soon as we touched a tile, we found ourselves being pushed away. Without a suitably positioned restraint system, we could not work to fix the damage. We would have damaged more tiles than we fixed. I asked that we not haul the MMU on the STS-1 mission, because it could not have helped us do tile repairs.

I'm honored to be recognized among generations of astronauts who were at the forefront of exploring our universe for the benefit of humankind.

It's been fun doing interviews with the other astronauts, getting to hear: 'Oh, that's how he explains it' or 'That's how she thinks about it.' We work together, but we don't necessarily share all those thoughts or ideas.

I spent a lot of my time working in the American module, and he would stay in the Russian segment working on his things, and we'd meet up at meal times. So it actually worked out very well.

Our goal is to tell people about the International Space Station. I think very rarely people look up 250 miles and think, What are those guys working on, what are those men and women doing at this moment... They're living and doing regular things, but also doing incredible work as well. We really want to bring that to people.

I was living in a small town in Indiana working as a telemarketer and a vacuum salesman. I was really bad: the vacuums seemed to always be falling apart. Every time I did a demonstration, I'd say, 'This is the material the astronauts used on Apollo 13.' And no sooner had that come out of my mouth, something would malfunction.

And not only that but... when the station is completed, there will be an international crew made of astronauts coming from different cultural experiences, speaking different languages, but working together for a common goal.

The workouts have positively impacted the astronauts' bones and muscles, and they are coming back in really good shape. But some are losing bone and muscle but not as much as we saw in the early days.

The photographs of space taken by our astronauts have been published all over the place. But the eye is a much more dynamic mechanism than any camera or pictures. It's a more exciting view in person than looking at the photographs. Of course, I personally am sick and tired of hearing people talk like that: I want to see it myself!

Let's not spend resources that we don't need to be sending astronauts back to the moon. Let's not spend expensive resources on bringing people who have reached Mars back again. Prepare them to become a growing colony.