As I step off at the surface at Taurus-Littrow, I’d like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible.
Get the shuttle out of the garage. It’s in its prime of its life. How could we just put it away?
Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I’m still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.
Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, and that’s a very dubious and disappointing honor. It’s been far too long.
I do believe there is life in outer space. Mathematically, there has to be, and if you believe as I do that there is a creator of the universe, then how can we be so arrogant to believe he created life here and nowhere else?
OK, let’s get this mother out of here.
It’s our destiny to explore. It’s our destiny to be a space-faring nation.
Today, we are on a path of decay. We are seeing the book close on five decades of accomplishment as the leader in human space exploration.
The moon is bland in color. I call it shades of gray. You know, the only color we see is what we bring or the Earth, which is looking down upon us all the time. And to find orange soil on the moon was a surprise.
Some astronauts describe the routine flushing of urine into space, where the freezing temperatures turn the droplets into a cloud of bright, drifting crystals, as being among the most amazing sights they saw on an entire voyage.
If you begin to think you’re something you’re not, you’re looking in the wrong mirror.
We don’t have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.
I was a child of World War Two. I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.
I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership in the world, to explore, to seek knowledge.
One of the most important things about the geology on the moon is your descriptions of what you see, comparing them to things that you’ve seen on Earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground would know what you’re talking about; and then take pictures of them.
Some of the most exciting space education in the country is not coming out of Washington or New York or California or even Texas. It’s coming from a place in Kansas called the Cosmosphere.
People try to typecast astronauts as heroic and superhuman. We’re only human beings.
Perhaps the two greatest moments of my life were standing on the moon and being outside of the room when my granddaughter was born! We tend not to remember the worst.
Mom was always doing something for somebody. She came from a Czech background, one that made her a devout Catholic and gave her a strong belief in the family.
Chemical propulsion is obsolete to go anywhere other than the moon. Three days – that’s acceptable. But for Mars, we need propulsion technologies to get us there in, say, 60 days – then spend whatever length of time we want to spend and return when we want to come home.