But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask; why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface.
Poised for flight, Wings spread bright, Spring from night into the Sun.
Retain the vision for space exploration. If we turn our backs on the vision again, we're going to have to live in a secondary position in human space flight for the rest of the century.
There are so many benefits to be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve for 50,000 years?
Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
In the coming era of manned space exploration by the private sector, market forces will spur development and yield new, low-cost space technologies. If the history of private aviation is any guide, private development efforts will be safer, too.
I have sat by night beside a cold lake And touched things smoother than moonlight on still water, But the moon on this cloud sea is not human, And here is no shore, no intimacy, Only the start of space, the road to suns.
In the 19th Century people were looking for the Northwest Passage. Ships were lost and brave people were killed, but that doesn't mean we never went back to that part of the world again, and I consider it the same in space exploration.
Roger, we copy. It was beautiful from here, Tranquility. Over.
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.
A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.
As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking on the moon and Jupiter... Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse.
NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world's premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget.
This is in a real sense the capstone of the initial missions to explore the planets. Pluto, its moons and this part of the solar system are such mysteries that New Horizons will rewrite all of the textbooks.
You see layers as you look down. you see clouds towering up. You see their shadows on the sunlit plains, and you see a ship's wake in the Indian Ocean and brush fires in Africa and a lightning storm walking its way across Australia. You see the reds and the pinks of the Australian desert, and it's just like a stereoscopic view of all nature, except you're a hundred ninety miles up.
Roger, Tranquility. Be advised there are lots of smiling faces in this room and all over the world. Over.
Space is so close: It took only eight minutes to get there and twenty to get back.
The great thing about being an astronaut is you kind of get to do a little bit of everything. I mean, we're going to ride a rocket uphill.
I was interested in flying beginning at age 7, when a close family friend took me in his little airplane. And I remember looking at the wheel of the airplane as we rolled down the runway, because I wanted to remember the exact moment that I first went flying... the other thing growing up is that I was always interested in science.
As much as we've enjoyed it up here, we're also starting to look forward to seeing all the people back on Earth that we miss and love so much.
The view of the moon that we've been having recently is really spectacular. It fills about three-quarters of the hatch window, and of course we can see the entire circumference even though part of it is in complete shadow and part of it is in earthshine. It's a view worth the price of the trip.
Houston, that may have seemed like a very long final phase. The autotargeting was taking us right into a ... crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks ... and it required ... flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area.
We had various kinds of tape-recorded concerts and popular music. But by the end of the flight what we listened to most was Russian folk songs. We also had recordings of nature sounds: thunder, rain, the singing of birds. We switched them on most frequently of all, and we never grew tired of them. It was as if they returned us to Earth.
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