Some things just can’t be described. And stepping onto the moon was one of them.
Anything we can do in the near future that begins to stimulate the interest of people – seeing somebody down the street have an opportunity to go into space – buoys up the whole neighborhood.
My sister called me “Buzzard” when I was a baby – she couldn’t say “Brother” so I’ve been Buzz my whole life.
As we begin to have landings on the moon, we can alternate those with vertical launch of similar crew modules on similar launch vehicles for vertical-launch tourism in space, if you want to call it that adventure travel.
When President Kennedy took office, I was in the midst of my education.
You can tell I’m not too bashful about some of my feelings.
A hybrid human-robot mission to investigate an asteroid affords a realistic opportunity to demonstrate new technological capabilities for future deep-space travel and to test spacecraft for long-duration spaceflight.
Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official.
Astronauts working for the government will always need to be either pilots or mission specialists. Those who want to be pilots should have military experience – ideally, a test pilot background.
Computers allow us to squeeze the most out of everything, whether it’s Google looking up things, so I guess that tends to make us a little lazy about reading books and doing things the hard way to understand how those things work.
My expertise is the space program and what it should be in the future based on my experience of looking at the transitions that we’ve made between pre-Sputnik days and getting to the moon.
When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we’ve downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent.
Space architectures capable of supporting a permanent human presence on Mars are extraordinarily complex, with many different interdependent systems.
I participated with great honor in becoming one of the first to land on the moon, and now I am devoting and have devoted many years of my life to enabling Americans to lead international nations to permanence on the planet Mars.
We must still think of ourselves as pioneers to understand the importance of space.
Any observations from the Moon or a sense of realising this or that about the greater meaning of things wasn’t as influential for me as the experience of coming back and dealing with being a person who’s been to the Moon.
I am excited to think that the development of commercial capabilities to send humans into low Earth orbit will likely result in so many more Earthlings being able to experience the transformative power of space flight.
To appropriately respond to an emergency requires a very clear mind, to cooly analyze what the observations are and how to fix it.
I think the people who experienced the Apollo missions came away from that experience wondering to themselves, ‘When can we get a chance to experience spaceflight?’ I’ve heard that many, many times: that people got into a new career field hoping that they would be able to experience spaceflight.
Mars, we know, was once wet and warm. Was it home to life? And what can living and learning to work on its rust-colored surface teach us about the future of our own planet, Earth? Answering those mysteries may hold the key to our future.