Top 77 Astronauts Quotes

Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour – understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

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

Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds – compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.

‘Love’ has that Kubrick tonality to it, but this is not a Stanley Kubrick movie – there will never be another. At the same time, ‘Love’ has a modern feel. For example: In one scene, these astronauts go through a wormhole sequence, and you feel like you’re being slapped around inside your head by a sonic boom.

I think it’s good to have competition. Now we have a third country that can launch astronauts, so it’s good for all of us. It makes us a little bit more competitive and wanting to be the leader.

I was only a hero by default. The flights were few and far between. There weren’t that many astronauts. The moon flights were so interesting and exciting.

The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry – astronauts have a way to parachute off the shuttle. The suits protect you from loss of pressure in case of emergency.

I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts.

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

What are you going to do with astronauts who first reach the surface of Mars and then turn around and rocket back home-ward? What are they going to do, write their memoirs? Would they go again? Having them repeat the voyage, in my view, is dim-witted. Why don’t they stay there on Mars?

Astronauts cannot pick their nicknames and can only get their nicknames from other astronauts. Any astronaut who tries to give himself a cool nickname will regret it by getting just the opposite from his astronaut friends.

Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.

It’s so astounding the amount of sacrifice the astronauts have to go through to do what they do and all the science involved in space exploration.

Different astronauts sleep in different ways.

For years, I longed to hear Armstrong describe what it was like to contemplate Earth from 238,900 miles away. Former Space Center director George Abbey once told me that many NASA astronauts felt that looking at Earth was akin to a religious experience.

There’s a latter-day notion that artsy hippie types in the 1960s disdained the space program. Not in my experience they didn’t. We watched, transfixed with reverence, not even making rude remarks about President Nixon during his phone call to the astronauts.

When many astronauts go to space, they see the insignificant size of the earth and vastness of space, and they become very religious, because they have seen the Signs of Allah.

I remember looking at the moon as an 8-year-old and marveling that there were two astronauts in a lander on the surface, getting ready to go out and actually walk. That settled it for me: I knew I was going to at least try to become an astronaut. I wanted to be like those guys.

Some of the senior people, the very senior astronauts, shook my hand and said, ‘K.C., you did a great job. Don’t let anyone tell you different.’

I’m absolutely compelled for NASA to send international astronauts to Mars to find out if Mars ever harbored life.

I’ve always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing.

Since there always has to be a certain number of astronauts manning the station at all times, one of the main aspects of the mission was to transport a new team to the station and bring back some members of the previous team back to Earth.

So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion – because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there’s not very much you can do.

Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-’60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.

We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.

All astronauts have degrees in science, engineering, or medicine, but other than that, there’s no one path to NASA. The one thing everyone has in common is we’ve all exceled in our chosen field.

When the moon was first visited in 1969, the astronauts brought back a treasure trove of unique minerals. Contained within specimens was an isotope called Helium-3, which turns out to be the perfect fuel for fusion reactors.

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.

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

On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background – the commander and the pilot.

I remember growing up thinking that astronauts and their job was the coolest thing you could possibly do… But I absolutely couldn’t identify with the people who were astronauts. I thought they were movie stars.

I destroyed all my geek stuff because I didn’t want to be a geek, and I regret it to this day. Consumed in the geek bonfire of the vanities was a collection of autographs and letters from Peter Cushing, Spike Milligan and Frankie Howerd, the first Doctor Whos, actual astronauts, and many more.

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.

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.

It would be great some day to have astronauts in a rover on Mars. But just about anyone except an oil company executive would say its more important to have 50 million solar powered vehicles in the United States.

In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them – in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.

People try to typecast astronauts as heroic and superhuman. We’re only human beings.

One of the astronauts I came to admire the most is John Young.

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.

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.

I am not a brave man… I do not have the right stuff. Astronauts are really a cut above.

Only by studying large numbers of people can we figure out, are astronauts dying at a higher rate of cancer, and what types of cancers, than other people?

It’s very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there’s radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It’d be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.

We are going to mint new astronauts from all communities. We want to influence public policy and opinion… by changing the mindset.

Some astronauts describe the routine flushing of urine into space, where the freezing temperatures turn the droplets into a cloud of bright, drifting crystals, as being among the most amazing sights they saw on an entire voyage.

NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA’s problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length.

I claim that space is part of our culture. You’ve heard complaints that nobody knows the names of the astronauts, that nobody gets excited about launches, that nobody cares anymore except people in the industry. I don’t believe that for a minute.

While we’ve taken seeds into space, and astronauts on the International Space Station have eaten lettuce they’ve grown, we haven’t produced fruit in space, so we can’t pollinate something.

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.