The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.
We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
The successful landing on the moon, very probably, is the best story.
All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.
The American people want and deserve a space program truly worthy of a nation of pioneers.
Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful, it's tough, it's buried in our mythic, childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.
I've always been a fan of space exploration, and I filled our entire office with space artifacts.
The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.
Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
It's important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now. It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it's been possible, and that window could be open for a long time - hopefully it is - or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.
I look forward to working with the NASA team to help enable new discoveries in our quest to understand our home planet and unravel the mysteries of the universe.
It is rash to set limits to the progress of science. A man who had maintained at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee that within fifty years one would fly the Atlantic in a matter of hours would have risked being certified and locked up; yet we have seen this happen, and in the circumstances I am not prepared to rule out with any confidence the possibility one day of journeys through space in vessels carrying supplies of food and oxygen to the moon and the nearer planets.
Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.
I think it's really a sign of great American strength that we do invest the money we do in technology, in these hard projects, in NASA.
Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.
I've put a lot of my life into making it possible to fly in space at all.
There is a potential to be a big explosion of what spaceflight is gonna mean to just an everyday person in the near future. I think it's very hopeful for our young people: all the exciting things that they could be doing in the future relative to space and space exploration.
It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.
There's going to be space travel at some point.
What comes after the moon? I think you can guess: Mars.
These robotic arms, provided by Canada, have been invaluable in allowing us to build, maintain, and repair space structures, and I've been very fortunate to have gotten to operate them.
Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.
A zero-gravity flight is a first step toward space travel.
All of this got me thinking about the history of the westward expansion, and got me to wondering how the exploration of the Solar System would be changed if there were an indigenous presence out there.
Spaceflight is a tricky business. It is definitely difficult, and I think we forget that sometime.
