Russia Quotes

Going to Mars is a bunch of baby steps, and it started off with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin.

The President wants to go to the moon. We hardly have enough money left in the treasury to go to Baltimore.

Lunokhod

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 was only in second grade when the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The night of his launch - April 12, 1961 - I went out onto the front porch and stared up at the stars, trying to see his capsule passing overhead. Like millions of others, I was enthralled by the idea of space exploration and have been ever since.

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

NASA was invented as a response to Cold War steps. There are those who presumed that we went to the moon because we're explorers. We went to the moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. And so when it became clear that they (Soviet Union) were not going to the moon, we're done with the moon.

Why should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure?

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic.

Everyone, red state, blue state, everyone supports space exploration.

Well, I don't think we should go to the moon. I think we maybe should send some politicians up there.

There weren't any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.

We didn't have rest days or weekends because we had to get ready as fast as possible, so we could beat the Americans, who were also racing to send a woman into space.

There was a space program before there was integrated circuits.

I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated.

The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.

I see Vostok-6 quite often in the centre for cosmonaut training. And every time I pass it by, I stroke it and say, 'My lovely one, my best and most beautiful friend, my best and most beautiful man.'

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.

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

There's nothing I would like more than to watch a manned Mars landing.

Several weeks before the Russians launched Sputnik, our team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory asked permission to place a rocket in orbit around the Earth. We could to it with two days of preparation. We had been doing experiments with 2 stage rockets to test materials and designs for nose-cones returning from space. We launched rockets straight up. At the maximum height we turned it around and fired the second stage to drive it straight back to Earth so it could achieve the speed of an object returning from space. We were developing more and more powerful second stage rockets. We had just calculated that our newest second stage had more than enough thrust to, after the ascent, turn the rocket at right angles to the perpendicular, and fire the rocket into orbit around the earth. We could do this easily. The military were initially very enthusiastic. America could be the first nation that put a satellite in orbit. However, the authorities in Washington, not only refused us permission to try, but postponed a number of our regular launches and forbade us from talking to anyone about our capability or request for our experiment.. When Sputnik was launched into orbit a few weeks later, we were really puzzled. No one ever explained why Washington had refused us permission, but we came up with a theory: The issue of the legality under international law of one country having its satellite in orbit over another country’s airspace was not at all settled. If we did satellite reconnaissance in the future over the Soviet Union, the Russians could claim that was an act of war. And we had extensive plans to create such satellites and launch them when we solved all the technical problems in the future. We believe that the authorities knew that the Russians were about to launch Sputnik. By allowing them to be the first to launch, it would be they—not us—who would be setting the precedent of sending satellites over other nation’s airspace and claiming this was not aggression or an act of war as they thought they were way ahead of us. In addition, after WWII, President Eisenhower was having difficulty getting Congress to spend money on rocketry and satellites as well as science and technology including science and mathematics education which was then terrible in America. So allowing the Russians to “beat us” the administration had the issue that they needed, and they allowed the Russians to set the legal precedents that they would have opposed if we were ahead of them and orbited a satellite first. Either President Eisenhower and his team were brilliantly shrewd or they were pretty dumb because we easily could have put our rockets in orbit then.

In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.

The Russians were responsible for the Chekov character. They put in 'Pravda' that, 'Ah, the ugly Americans are at it again. They do a space show, and they forget to include the people who were in space first.' And I said, 'My God, they're right.'

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.

When President Kennedy challenged Americans to go to the moon, the question wasn't whether we'd get there, it was only when we'd get there.