Trevor Paglen Quotes

At the end of October 4 in 1957, when I was coming back from sea duty in the South Pacific, Sputnik went up. I realized that humans would be right behind robot aircraft or spacecraft even though I really had no plans of being in aviation or a professional aviator and certainly not in the military.

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.

Lunokhod

I grew up in the 1960s and wanted to become part of the great space exploration effort, but when I graduated from college in 1974, the Apollo program was over, and the country had moved into this pessimistic mode. We had entered the 'age of limits.'

Yuri's Night is a world celebration for everyone who's interested in a human presence in space - without concern for politics, the Cold War, countries that do and don't have space programs.

All space projects push the frontiers of technology and are drivers of innovation.

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.

My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.

As a member of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, I am a firm believer in the American space program.

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.

When Kennedy said, 'Let's go to the moon,' we didn't yet have a vehicle that wouldn't kill you on launch. He said we'll land a man on the moon in eight years and bring him back. That was an audacious goal to put forth in front of the American people.

The Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems, too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work.

It's our destiny to explore. It's our destiny to be a space-faring nation.

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

I witnessed the building of the Space Shuttle Columbia, the first orbiter to be launched into space.

Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States.

I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut.

In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

I think it's like that for people who don't remember 1969 first-hand. It's that sense of 'old hat.' Of 'been there, done that.' Space shuttles, space stations, communications satellites, GPS - they're all part of our everyday, taken-for-granted world in 2009, not part of an incredible odyssey.

I want manned spaceflight, not just back to the Moon, but beyond that. And I want my daughters and my son to have their own July 20, 1969, to remember. Apollo 11 didn't give us wings; it only showed us how far the wings we had would take us.

After six successful Apollo flights, including two lunar landings, people were getting bored.

It is practically certain that sometime during 1958, either the Russians or we, and most likely both, are going to shoot a rocket to the moon.

I'm a very amateur scientist. For me, it started with the Mercury space program and onward to the moon landing in my impressionable adolescent years.

I don't know all the future steps, but I know one of them: we need to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle. No matter which path we take, it has to include that gate, and so that's why that's Blue Origin's mission.