Words matter. These are the best Spacecraft Quotes from famous people such as Gene Kranz, Leroy Chiao, Henry Spencer, Carolyn Porco, Jared Isaacman, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
On the first flight test of any spacecraft, you’re going to find surprises.
Did I think about the risks? Of course I did. Anyone who says otherwise is not being completely honest. The amount of energy it takes to bring a spacecraft to orbital speed, and the forces it endures on re-entry, makes risk impossible to avoid.
The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an ‘escape tower’ containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch.
When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years.
I think any pilot with my kind of background, flying ex-military-type aircraft and experimental aircraft, would say that the pinnacle is to be able to pilot a spacecraft – there’s no question.
I think that, a lot of times, people have this idea that the solar system is entirely explored, that we have sent spacecraft to every planet, we’ve taken beautiful pictures of everything, and that it’s kind of done.
Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No – actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.
All of us who are flying on international space stations speak some Russian and speak some English. Both the languages are needed to fly in a Russian spacecraft and communicate with your colleagues.
I have always loved aeroplanes and spacecraft and the design element.
The winners in life treat their body as if it were a magnificent spacecraft that gives them the finest transportation and endurance for their lives.
It’s unfortunate, but I know it’s the right thing to do to end the shuttle program. If we want to do other things, we need a different spacecraft.
The missing toothbrush was nothing compared with the fact that the spacecraft was orientated to ascend, not descend. I would have gone up and up instead of going back down to the ground.
The era during which only governments could put hardware on the Moon is coming to an end. There are 26 private teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize – to be awarded for sending a robotic spacecraft to this nearby world that can roam at least 500 meters, and send back data such as a photo.
I don’t think we’re going to build a 50-person spacecraft or a 100-person spacecraft.
The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now.
It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.
On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system.
One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven’t done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar.
We’re being very careful that we don’t send a spacecraft to Mars with the intention of detecting Martian life – and find out that we detected the Earth life that we took with us.
NASA wanted to assure its ability to examine the spacecraft in orbit for signs of damage.
So with ‘Ascent,’ one of the things I wanted to do was not make it too remote from the reader, for it to be engaged with the human side and not just to be about the cold metal of planes and spacecraft.
A spacecraft cockpit interior is a set where there are a lot of little techy bits, control panels and graphics displays, and other things that are kind of a job to manufacture well.
When you’re in a spacecraft, you need to know what things you can touch and what things you shouldn’t touch!
The reason that we don’t have happy hours up here is because you never know when something might actually go sideways, and so we always have to be prepared in a worst, worst case scenario to jump on our spacecraft and go home. So, we have to keep it pretty straight and narrow while we’re up here.
I thought it would be good for the engineers and workmen who were building my spacecraft to see the pilot who would have to fly it hanging around. It might make them just a little more careful than they already were and a little more eager to get the work done on time if they saw how much I cared.
New Horizons is a very high-tech, small, roughly 1,000-pound spacecraft with the most powerful battery of scientific instrumentation ever brought to bear on a first reconnaissance mission.
I hope that vigorous space exploration continues and that humankind will have a space station that resides between Earth and the moon. Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system.
Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn’t going to be much like flying an airplane.
It was a very strange time in the late 1950s/early 1960s, when people were putting things in space, but that language of spacecraft hadn’t really congealed yet. A lot of artists at that time were looking at them as aesthetic objects.
There was a time when Pluto – which NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led – was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other – possibly inhabited – planets.
Being first outside the spacecraft would bring much more responsibility, and I really wasn’t looking for that.
When I was a young man in school, I used to read science fiction and really liked it. And as I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that.
For the industry we’re starting now, for suborbital flight, there is no destination, so the spacecraft you go up in has to be large and spacious. That’s why SpaceShipTwo is much bigger than SpaceShipOne: It needs to be because you want those six people to be floating around and enjoying themselves.
An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft.
When I saw the Earth from above, personally, as a spacecraft operator, it certainly reinforced and drove home the fact that there’s one place where we can live right now.
