Buzz Aldrin Quotes

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

I think the Space Shuttle is worth one billion dollars a launch. I think that it is worth two billion dollars for what it does. I think the Shuttle is worth it for the work it does.

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.

After the Shuttle checks out on its two upcoming flights, it will be ready to take larger components up to the International Space Station later this fall.

We are not building the space station for science any more than we went to the moon for science, but we got a hell of a lot of good science out of it.

The International Space Station is a great place to live for a year.

The Space Shuttle was a great machine. Without it, we would not have been able to build the International Space Station because the parts and modules were delivered by Shuttle crews.

If I were part of Gaganyaan, I could have been sure that for the next few years, there would have been a second space mission and a third space mission.

So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.

I feel privileged and honored to have flown. It's been a tremendous ride, looking back on the legacy and accomplishments, like the Hubble telescope and the launching of the International Space Station in 1998.

After Apollo 17, America stopped looking towards the next horizon. The United States had become a space-faring nation, but threw it away. We have sacrificed space exploration for space exploitation, which is interesting but scarcely visionary.

The government will see that human spaceflight is useful - for science and the economy - and inspirational.

Well, with so many space shuttle missions that we've done, I think it's just sort of natural that each one hasn't necessarily gotten the attention that the early ones did.

Does it make sense for the U.S. to expend hundreds of billions of dollars to mount a new Apollo-style program to return to the moon? Or have we blazed that trail? Shouldn't we help other nations achieve this goal with their own resources but with our help?

During my 8 years as chairman, I had the privilege to peer into the future to see dynamic citizen astronauts returning to and from the heavens which we can expect in the future.

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

Through these ongoing activities and possibly in the future, a Canadian will go live and work on the International Space Station and we will continue to make Canadians proud of our achievements in space.

Many of us in Congress have been calling on the Administration to articulate a bold mission for NASA. It seems that the President is answering that call. I wholeheartedly support his vision for going back to the moon, and from there to worlds beyond.

Instead of planning the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, America should be preparing the shuttles for their next step in space: evolving, not shutting them down and laying off thousands of people.

In 1983, NASA invited Canada to fly three payload specialists, in part because we had contributed the robotic arm that is used on the shuttle.

Every astronaut flew into space for a living. But while NASA has not solved the security problems, I would not put me back into a shuttle - and no other astronaut. The confidence is shaken.

We must become a space-faring nation.

We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here – our hopes and our journeys continue.

I think even in bad times it's good to keep some money going into research. And that's the purpose of the whole space program. It's not just exploration and going to see how far we can go out into space and keep people alive and bring them back, although exploration certainly has its place.

For me, maybe, in comparison with other cosmonauts who were inspired by the Sputnik launch or Yuri Gagarin launch, I think I'm cosmonaut of another generation. For me, the spaceflights were sort of a common thing.