I wrote ‘Reaching for the Moon’ because I wanted to tell kids that all of us have a moon, a dream, that we can strive for. Even if you don’t attain it, you can at least reach for it.
Instead of planning the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, America should be preparing the shuttles for their next step in space: evolving, not shutting them down and laying off thousands of people.
I think we need to move to the moons of Mars and learn how to control robots that are on the surface. It’s not the impatient way of getting there, but Mars has been there a long time.
I really hate to be put in the position of trying to justify something, a decision that was made. I’m a military guy: when a decision is made, I go along with it, whatever the manufactured controversy and criticism.
By venturing into space, we improve life for everyone here on Earth – scientific advances and innovations that come from this kind of research create products we use in our daily lives.
The moon I see now is the same moon I saw before. Except that before, when I looked at it, it was in anticipation of what it would be like when I got there. That’s behind me now.
The society of life on Mars, or the challenge of making Mars more livable, will have significant benefits on our attempts to modify and change in some ways the environment here on Earth.
It was challenging to understand what was necessary to successfully carry out all the training simulations that we, as crewmen, would experience, and make a very successful use of that training and education.
We need the next generation to be motivated and to push technological boundaries, to seek out new innovations.
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.