NASA mission Quotes

Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write "Tough and Competent" on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

President Bush announced a billion dollar mission to the moon and Mars. He came up with a snappy new slogan - to drill where no man has drilled before.

A new Republican Congress is taking over. Sen. Ted Cruz has been appointed tooverseeing NASA in Congress. He says he wants NASA to focus on finding aliens so he can deport them.

That's what we want to do here at Johnson Space Center. I think what we have always brought to NASA and brought to the country is trying to push the boundaries, trying to go to the next level.

In the press grandstand where I watched Discovery rise against the cloudless sky, the media hit the abort button on cynicism. The Earth shook to the sounds of man, three miles away. The candle lit. . . only someone stripped of awe can leave a launch untouched.

President Bush announced a major new plan for the United States to put a man on the moon, which would be a really big story if this were 1962. Bush said he didn't remember anything about the 60's - I guess he wasn't lying.

NASA's charter is to give Americans the means to get into the wild, black yonder, beyond even the grasp of the federal government that funded it.

Ground control to Major Tom.

I will fight in the United States Senate this year to fund a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008, a mission that would potentially increase Hubble's power and efficiency by a factor of 10 and allow us to look back almost to the beginning of the universe.

There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.

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.

By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.

The mission of NASA's Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass ('transit') in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds.

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.

Houston, we have a problem.

When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.

On a sunny Tuesday - for it seems so many awful things happen on a Tuesday - six astronauts and one schoolteacher attempted to pierce the sky. Instead they touched the stars.

I think about the personal accomplishment, but there's more of a sense of the grand achievement by all the people who could put this man on the moon.