Top 141 NASA Quotes

I can’t think of anything specific growing up that pointed me toward NASA at all. I was interested in the Moon landings just about the same as everyone else of my generation. But I never really thought about being an astronaut or working in space myself.

NASA has made a difference.

I’m track 3 with fabulous French dialogue on the ‘Star Is Born’ album. I’m track 3 ‘NASA’ on Ariana Grande’s album. From ‘All Stars 3,’ went to ‘Drag Race’ three times, never won. Three is my lucky number.

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.

I thought that NASA didn’t take biologists and so nothing would come of it. But I knew I would regret it if I did not apply.

I got a hold of NASA, four times, I said, ‘I want to become an astronaut.’ But nobody would take me. I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up.

I’m actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.

NASA space scientists have been studying giraffe skin so they can apply what they learn from it to the construction of spacesuits.

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.

All the NASA footage is in the public domain, and it’s so beautiful; it’s really stunning.

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.

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.

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.

At Indy, we are the NASA of the production-car world, and that’s clearly why manufacturers are involved – it’s such a good testbed.

Joining NASA was very exciting, but it was the hardest decision I have had to make in my life.

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

Cassini was an international undertaking, led by NASA and the European Space Agency and designed to be, in every dimension, a dramatic advance over Voyager. At the size of a school bus, it was bigger than Voyager and outfitted with the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever carried into the outer solar system.

Science at NASA is all about exploring the endless frontier of the Earth and space.

To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as ‘what NASA does’. This perception is – in many respects – a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.

While NASA talks about ‘Are we alone?’ as a number one question, they are putting zero money into searching for intelligent life. There’s a big disconnect there.

NASA has been scattered to the four winds.

NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.

Would offering the Mars Prize damage NASA? I don’t think so.

You have to budget time for the inevitable problems that come up with children. You have to always be ahead of the game. If your proposal is due at NASA on Friday, it has to be finished on Wednesday because, on Thursday, it could be fevers and head lice.

I want to use the abilities that God has given me to do my job well and support my crewmates and mission and NASA.

Nothing focuses your mind quite like flying a jet. That’s one reason NASA requires that astronauts fly T-38s: it forces us to concentrate and prioritize in some of the same ways we need to in a rocket ship.

NASA needs to focus on the things that are really important and that we do not know how to do. The agency is a pioneering force, and that is where its competitive advantage lies.

NASA has spin-offs, and it’s a huge and very impressive list, including accurate and affordable LASIK eye surgery.

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.

After World War II, defending America in the modern world required new intelligence agencies, the unification of the armed services under a massive new Defense Department, and later the creation of new civilian organizations with some defense functions, such as NASA and the Energy Department.

One of the things that always appealed to me about Nasa was we were always doing cool stuff that no-one’s done before.

NASA projects often have romantic names that link into a long history of exploration and adventure: Atlantis and Discovery, for example.

‘Rocket Boys,’ for one reason or the other, just happened to strike a chord across country and across world, maybe because it’s set in a little coal-mining town. That’s why NASA likes it – most of the engineers come from towns very similar.

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.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

Floyd Thompson, a white man, desegregated NASA. Period.

When I was a kid, I was a bit of a space geek. I loved the space program and all things NASA. I would read books about our solar system; I had pictures of the Space Shuttle on my bedroom wall. And yes, I even went to Space Camp.

The mission of NASA’s Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass (‘transit’) in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds.

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

To me, NASA is kind of the magical kingdom. I was sort of a geek, and you go there, and there are just these wondrously strange things and people.

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.

That’s what we want to do here at Johnson Space Center. I think what we have always brought to NASA and brought to the country is trying to push the boundaries, trying to go to the next level.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

From NASA putting a man on the moon to DARPA developing what later became the Internet, the U.S. government, through a host of different public agencies, has provided direct financing not only of basic research but also public venture capital; both Apple and Tesla have received direct public funding.

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.

Cutting NASA education funds would most severely affect students from low- to middle-income families and students from non-Ivy League-level schools.

The secret life of women is to men what the universe is to NASA – unimaginably infinite and completely undiscoverable.

‘The Martian’ may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.

The U.S. federal government may be going broke, but it’s not because of NASA.

NASA’s been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve, and it’s sad that we are turning the program in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation it provides to young people.

For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.

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

A few months after NASA was formed, I was asked if I knew anyone who would like to set up a program in space astronomy.

Science fiction writers didn’t predict the fade-out of NASA’s manned space operations, and they weren’t prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.

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.

Sequencing DNA on the ISS will enable NASA to see what happens to genetic material in space in real time, rather than looking at a snapshot of DNA before launch and another snapshot of DNA after launch and filling in the blanks.