Ray Bradbury Quotes

When I was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, this is where the space and rocket center was. This is where all of the German rocket scientists came after war and started designing rockets for NASA, for the moon landing and all that.

Most people never believed in the real possibility of going to the moon, and neither did I until I was in my twenties.

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.

I left Aerospace because I wanted to go build, and put spacecraft together.

I've always loved airplanes and flight. The space program was really important to me as a kid. I still have a photo of Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon in my living room.

It seems that 'rocket scientist' is a job category that's here for the long haul, like 'mortician.' But all this activity masks an important point: rockets are not a terribly efficient way to lift things into space.

For the new century, back to the moon, back to the future and this time back to stay. And then a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet, a manned mission to Mars.

Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future.

I would not be able to change a sparking plug and I would not be able to fly a spaceship or build a rocket or whatever. But what I am good at doing is finding brilliant people and surrounding myself with brilliant people.

A rocket is a reed that thinks brilliantly.

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department.

The Moon has given us months, tides and a destination that ever-beckons. It's time we build a rocket and go to stay.

All the best to SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and, yes, the Progress teams, who are all working on their own solutions to open the frontier along with Boeing and the rest of the fliers trying to fly, all of whom I know personally share the dream. This isn't their fault; they just want to make things fly.

We go across lands, we go across water. And then the next logical step was to start flying just over a hundred years ago and of course, now we're going to look up at the stars and say what's next, what's out there?

During one of the Apollo missions, I saw Walter Cronkite showing off the flight plan. It just mesmerized me. All this detail! That's what I wanted.

In Missouri, we built the steamships that plied the Mississippi. It was people of Missouri who believed that a human being could fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone. And it was Missourians who built the capsule in which an American first orbited the earth.

When I was a child, and I was at our school, everybody's parents were involved in space program. In every class, we have several kids whose fathers were flown cosmonauts or who prepared for the flight.

If you look, like, in 1960, there was no such thing as an astronaut. It was a totally fanciful concept, but nine years later or whatever, we were landing on the moon, which is just astonishing.

A space nerd as a kid, I learned early that putting a man on the moon took American unity, grit, determination, teamwork, hardship, innovation, sacrifice and patriotism.

Ironically the very energy, the very basis of how we know what we know, has been reliant on having an energy source [necessary] to build rockets to go to the moon and Mars, to support airplanes that fly, and satellites to give us our communication.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums.

I know you're all saying I can go to the moon but I can't find Pasadena.