Top 121 Astronaut Quotes

As a young boy, I was very interested – as I still am – in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.

I originally wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. Then I had this huge fear of black holes because my brother learned a bunch of stuff about it, and he’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, if you go into one you’re never coming back.’

I have to admit that talking authoritatively about my students’ stories can make me feel, at times, like an astronaut who has just landed on a new planet and insists on giving guided tours to its inhabitants.

We actually say in ‘Nightbreed,’ ‘God is an astronaut, Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters go.’ There’s a lovely sense in which there’s a simple thesis being played out here. These are things you understand as a child out on the play yard.

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I grew up in Houston. Gordo Cooper was my favorite astronaut.

I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early ’70s was going to be an astronaut.

From day one, I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts. As a pilot, I flew in the sky. Now that I am an astronaut, I will fly in space.

I wanted to become an astronaut because I believe that the exploration of space by humans is extremely important.

I didn’t really realize that writing… would be fun and people would pay you to do it. Being an astronaut is a glory profession, and so is writing, in a way.

If you look, like, in 1960, there was no such thing as an astronaut. It was a totally fanciful concept, but nine years later or whatever, we were landing on the moon, which is just astonishing.

When I became an astronaut, I was an engineer.

What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire – the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.

Ideas for stories come to me based on my life, so who knows? If somebody sends me to become an astronaut, that’s what I’ll end up writing.

I like acting for now. But after seeing Apollo 13, what I really want to do is to be an astronaut. I’m dying to go to a space camp next summer!

The astronaut corps is a very small part of a very large team that enables human spaceflight.

I wish that I was one of those kids who grew up saying I always wanted to be an astronaut and was really good at science and math. But that wasn’t really the case. I always liked it, but I never believed I was one of the smart kids.

I was a naval officer and aviator. I tested airplanes and got selected to be an astronaut later on.

I never want my children to ever feel like they need to be a SEAL, or that they need to go into medicine, or be an astronaut in order to please me – because I don’t think that’s very fair. I just want them to live their own lives. I don’t hesitate at every opportunity to remind my children of that.

I went to school at night in L.A. to brush up on my engineering while I applied to the astronaut program. I really did not know if I would get in. It was the year after the Challenger accident in 1987.

If I couldn’t be an actor, I would only consider being an astronaut, a sea otter, or a gynecologist.

What guy didn’t want to be an astronaut growing up?

My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.

Growing up, people will tell you that you have a better chance to become an astronaut than becoming an NBA player. So when you finally get to the NBA, you’ve beat the odds. So when you put on that jersey, everything else is downhill.

It is an incredible treat and certainly one of the highlights of any astronaut’s career to do a spacewalk.

Because Blue Peter can get you access to places – if you go to somewhere like Nasa, you don’t just see what most people see, you can get a lot of behind the scenes access. You can talk to an astronaut.

As an astronaut, you have a very defined set of tasks to do. Those tasks may require you to work 60, 70 or 80 hours a week.

My neighborhood was rough, but I live a great life now. I don’t fight that much now. I don’t look for it anyway, but if someone hits your mother, whether you’re a star, an accountant, or an astronaut or anything… I mean it’s your mother, so I lost my mind.

I got this letter asking me if I wanted to or if I would consider going to experimental test pilot school and becoming the first Negro astronaut and I thought it was crazy.

By high school, I had traded my oversized, thick glasses for contact lenses, but my eyesight was getting worse every year, smothering my childhood aspiration of becoming an astronaut or, at least, a pilot.

Being a leading man… that’s like saying, ‘I want to be astronaut.’ That’s not going to happen.

I like the fact that, as an actor, one day I can be the president. I can be an astronaut.

And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight.

As a former Apollo astronaut, I think it’s safe to say that SpaceX and the other commercial developers embody the 21st century version of the Apollo frontier spirit.

Most of us at least briefly considered answering, ‘An astronaut,’ when asked as children what we wanted to be when we grew up.

At the age of six, I declared that I wanted to be an astronaut. My mother thought that was just fine, as it would encourage me to learn science, and besides, there really was no chance I would ever actually become an astronaut.

I really feel like, on my first mission, the first mission is when you prove yourself and hopefully deserve the privilege to continue as an astronaut and remain in the corps and get granted an opportunity for a second mission.

Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business.

I think doing something of your life is something that you’ve got deep inside, whether it’s to, whether you want to be an astronaut or a, whether you want to do science, or whether you want to be a movie star, or whatever.

Bringing the astronaut’s nightmare to life so vividly is a remarkable accomplishment but Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron want more than just the adrenaline ride – they’re feeding our wonder and inviting us to think deeply about profound questions of existence.

Life as an astronaut in space is a very interesting one. There are things we all take for granted here on earth, like gravity, that can make things a bit challenging. One of the fun things about getting here is the zero gravity and floating around. But it also makes things very difficult.

Rugby has surprisingly helped me a lot as an astronaut and when I’m training in the space suit.

Being an astronaut is a wonderful career. I feel very privileged. But what I really hope for young people is that they find a career they’re passionate about, something that’s challenging and worthwhile.

It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut.

Now, as an astronaut, I have to bring a Sharpie with me everywhere – so I have a pen to sign autographs.

I had done everything I could do as an astronaut, and we have a long line of inexperienced astronauts waiting for their first missions, and so my role really should be to step aside and help them prepare for their missions, rather than to try to get another mission.

Army astronauts have a very proud legacy in the astronaut program.

I wanted to become president, and I wanted to become an astronaut. Because I was really good at math.

I get a call – said, do you want to be an astronaut? I said, oh, my gosh, yes. And he said, be here on Monday to take these tests. I had needles stuck in every part of my body, tubes running up my bottom, so I went along with it. It didn’t bother me.

My name is Leland Tyler Wayne. My mom wanted to give me a name where, no matter what I wanted to do, I’d be able to do it. An astronaut. President. Whatever.

By my mid-30s, I just thought, ‘This is not going to happen. I am never going to become an astronaut in the U.K.’

I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1960s, and I think there was a synchronicity of events that inspired me to be an astronaut, and, of course, the backdrop is nothing less than Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. That was a time in our nation where we aspired to great things, and we achieved them.

Until space tourism is a destination-based business (e.g. flights to a private space station or to the moon), will flyers pay to fly more than once after having earned their astronaut wings? The answer to this is likely very dependent on the experience itself.

I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children’s author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.