Spacecraft Quotations

At the end of October 4 in 1957, when I was coming back from sea duty in the South Pacific, Sputnik went up. I realized that humans would be right behind robot aircraft or spacecraft even though I really had no plans of being in aviation or a professional aviator and certainly not in the military.

For the industry we're starting now, for suborbital flight, there is no destination, so the spacecraft you go up in has to be large and spacious. That's why SpaceShipTwo is much bigger than SpaceShipOne: It needs to be because you want those six people to be floating around and enjoying themselves.

I left Aerospace because I wanted to go build, and put spacecraft together.

The missing toothbrush was nothing compared with the fact that the spacecraft was orientated to ascend, not descend. I would have gone up and up instead of going back down to the ground.

The era during which only governments could put hardware on the Moon is coming to an end. There are 26 private teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize - to be awarded for sending a robotic spacecraft to this nearby world that can roam at least 500 meters, and send back data such as a photo.

Being first outside the spacecraft would bring much more responsibility, and I really wasn't looking for that.

To try to really land a spacecraft really on another world is really difficult, and if we lose that ability, it's going to be heartbreaking.

I'm urging NASA to foster the development of what I call 'runway landers.' No, that's not the name of a high stakes gambler from Vegas. It's a type of spacecraft that flies to orbit like the retiring Shuttles but then glides to a landing like an airplane on a runway. Just like the Shuttles do.

There is a project that's underway called the interplanetary Internet. It's in operation between Earth and Mars. It's operating on the International Space Station. It's part of the spacecraft that's in orbit around the Sun that's rendezvoused with two planets.

I don't think we're going to build a 50-person spacecraft or a 100-person spacecraft.

It's easy to reckon that the oomph to hurl even a Smart Car-size spacecraft to another star at, say, 20 percent the speed of light (and land it when it arrives) is the energy contained in 50 billion gallons of gasoline. The tank's not big enough.

When you're in a spacecraft, you need to know what things you can touch and what things you shouldn't touch!

One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven't done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar.

Odyssey is now closer to Mars than Earth. The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are looking good. Planning for Mars approach and orbit insertion is our primary focus right now.

Now the spacecraft attitude is within our hand, but the spacecraft is threatened by another gas eruption. That is why we have to perform the baking operation to exclude those gases from the spacecraft. The xenon gas left is sufficient for the return cruise to the Earth.

This was a great dress rehearsal for the Io encounters. We've been wondering how the spacecraft might hold up when it gets close to Io. This latest brush with radiation makes us think that the odds of survival may be fairly good.

China's development in the field of manned spacecraft has no relation with any 'military threat',

We've been trying to do this kind of thing for about a decade. We attempted to do it on one of our Mars probe, but either we got weathered out or the spacecraft misread some stars and everything closed down.

We took a spacecraft and flew it five years. But in these five years, we went back to the origin of time - to the origin of our solar system.

Stardust is still very healthy and has fuel left over. After dropping the Space Return Canister, the spacecraft was diverted from entering the Earth's atmosphere and placed in an orbit around the sun that could bring it to another comet in February 2011.

NASA wanted to assure its ability to examine the spacecraft in orbit for signs of damage.

Our spacecraft has finally become an orbiter. The celebration feels great, but it will be very brief because before we start our main science phase, we still have six months of challenging work to adjust the orbit to the right size and shape.

On the technical side, Apollo 8 was mainly a test flight for the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft. The main spacecraft system that needed testing on a real lunar flight was the onboard navigation system.

Unfortunately, recovering from something like a reset is a slow, lengthy process. You don't know what caused the problem, and the immediate concern is that whatever triggered it will do it again next time you try it. The thing you have to do is fire up each of the rover's capabilities one at a time, checking each one carefully and individually to see whether it would cause another reset or not. Standard spacecraft troubleshooting practicebut it takes time.

You just want to hang there and let the spacecraft gradually adjust the asteroid's course.

We have a tremendous amount of anxiety and concern. At the same time, I feel confident. We have a very good spacecraft that has been performing extraordinarily well. We have an excellent well-trained team that's ready to go forward.

We have swept through all of the planets in the solar system, from Mercury to Neptune, in a historic 20 (to) 30 year age of spacecraft discovery,

We are totally prepared, both for if everything goes perfectly and if the spacecraft acts up a little bit.

There are no leaks in the hangars and the doors are sandbagged. The Pluto spacecraft is doing fine.

We have ignition and liftoff of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on a decade long voyage to visit the planet Pluto and then beyond.

We have gone to the limits of what this system can do, which is way beyond the original design and requirements. That's really allowed us to squeeze every ounce of performance out of both systems, spacecraft and propulsion.

We have been preparing for years for the critical events the spacecraft must execute on Friday.

We would like to have students and other engineers exercise and operate the spacecraft after the biology has been completed for at least some of that time. Of course, if a critical system were to fail or wear out, like the batteries or communications radio, then that's it since we do not have a lot of redundancy in the design.

We sang our spacecraft to sleep today with a melody of digital ones and zeros. Stardust has performed flawlessly these last seven years and 2.88 billion miles, and deserves a rest for a while, like the rest of the team.

We are getting into the dangerous portion of the mission. The cruise has not been easy, but now we are starting to enter into the realm where we have lost two spacecraft in the last 15 years.

We're extremely proud and excited to be partnered with NASA on this mission to Mars, adding to the fleet of spacecraft that are revealing the mysteries of our planetary neighbor. MRO has been performing extremely well over the past seven months and during this cruise stage and the team has been busy monitoring and calibrating many of the spacecraft systems and instruments as we prepare MRO for orbital insertion and its ultimate mission. The entire NASA, JPL and Lockheed Martin team is ready to perform this critical maneuver for MRO and we are looking forward to continuing this exciting voyage of space exploration and discovery.

We're getting into the dangerous portion of the mission. Now we're starting to enter into the realm where we've lost two spacecraft in the last 15 years.

The spacecraft has been programmed to continue even in the event of an emergency. We don't want Cassini to call home if a problem arises, we want it to keep going.

The spacecraft has to be smart enough on its own to observe the comet, determine whether it's headed in the right direction, if not, make its own course correction, and then fire its thrusters to achieve that course correction.

The spacecraft is where it needs to be and going at the right speed and in the right direction.

The spacecraft is working well and we are feeling good. All space scientific experiments are carried out as planned.

The team is trained and confident. The spacecraft systems are healthy and performing as expected, and we're looking forward to adding MRO to the (spacecraft) constellation at Mars.

When you get below a certain level you have concerns about overheating the spacecraft or potentially breaking pieces of it off,

This spacecraft and systems will build upon the foundation of the proven designs and technologies used in the Apollo and space shuttle programs, while having far greater capability.

This spacecraft is a comet explorer. It has the tools to do a lot more.

This spacecraft is going to rewrite the science textbooks on Mars.

This spacecraft will return more data than all previous Mars missions combined.

The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch.

This new wave of spacecraft will be yielding tons of detail a baseline for grasping how other planets work. The Moon is a keystone to that understanding.

Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.

We did a bottoms-up look at every possible shape, from a spacecraft with wings, to lifting bodies, to gum drops like Russia's Soyuz. The physics drove us back to the (Apollo) capsule.

Of the 13,000 objects, over 40 percent came from breakups of both spacecraft and rocket bodies.

There's going to be big cuts in the spacecraft program.

This is a monumental achievement for NASA JPL and the space community. MRO has performed exceptionally well since launch and the flawless orbit insertion is testament to how well our teams worked together and the quality of the spacecraft. Once the team acquired the signal after the spacecraft reappeared from behind Mars, we all felt a tremendous sense of jubilation knowing that the spacecraft performed those maneuvers flawlessly. NASA and JPL now have another healthy satellite in orbit around Mars.

This is a significant breakthrough of China's space technology since the successful spaceflight of manned spacecraft Shenzhou-5.

Indeed, the asteroid's orbit is particularly attractive for spacecraft rendezvous, and the extraordinary close encounter in April 2029 provides a unique opportunity to investigate a number of scientific NEO issues.

In recent decades, spacecraft have passed fairly close to comets and provided us with excellent data. Stardust, however, marks the first time that we have ever collected samples from a comet and brought them back to Earth for study.

In the first stage, a low-orbit system of personal e-mail-type satellite communication, Gonets-D1, was deployed on the basis of six satellites of the same name. Among other things, it provides communication links between governmental structures and remote areas. The satellite to be launched on Tuesday is the first one in the multifunctional personal satellite communication system Gonets-D1M to be built in the second stage. We plan to launch 12 spacecraft of this type. They will operate in four dimensions, three satellites in each.

If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled-up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and repeat the sequence. You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to hit that window jamb, that door, that chair. Get back on course and do it again. How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around your own apartment?

It's really going spectacularly well. The whole approach to testing a spacecraft is to walk before you run.

It's been marching along on its own all weekend long and we aren't going to do anything more to the spacecraft unless, in the very unlikely event that something goes wrong.

At this point, we're still very confident that we're in orbit in Mars and that we're going to see the spacecraft signal in a few hours.

The U.S. has a spacecraft on its way to Pluto, on to the Kuiper belt and on to the stars.

Clearly I'm going to crash the spacecraft anyway, ... We're trying to do the most useful thing scientifically.

Certainly the lesson from the Genesis crash, which was apparently caused by parts incorrectly installed, is that you've got to be meticulous in your engineering. And that's certainly going to be the case for Mars. We are going to have to design any return spacecraft from Mars so that it can handle a hard landing, such as we saw for Genesis.

Galileo is one of the most successful outer worlds missions that the Earth has ever launched. This spacecraft has given us some unbelievable discoveries.

It takes 7 1/2 minutes for a signal to get from Earth to the spacecraft and another 7 1/2 minutes to get back. So, we can't joystick this spacecraft like a video game.

It's great these images turned out well because a lot of things had to work right, including exactly how the spacecraft points and the stability. It turned out just right.

It'll be the fastest spacecraft ever to Jupiter13 months after launch. We pass the Moon in just nine hours.

The engine would be in orbit, producing a beam of photons. The spacecraft would not have to carry that mass along.

The five solid rocket boosters are burning just fine, sending the New Horizons spacecraft on its way to the very edge of our solar system.

This is a great milestone to have accomplished, but it's just one of many milestones before we can open the champagne. Once we are in the prime science orbit, the spacecraft will perform observations of the atmosphere, surface, and subsurface of Mars in unprecedented detail.

It's the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It will get to the Moon in nine hours?it will get to Jupiter in one year and nine months.

There's a certain amount of nervousness at present. ... It's a harsh environment out there and this is not easy. We don't really know what to expect, frankly. ... It could be anything from a crater the size of a football stadium to something that's far more modest. Or the spacecraft could simply bury itself into the comet.

There is no time for the team as a whole to react ... so we have on board all the programs we need to carry out, and the spacecraft has to do it all on its own.

We have a crew onboard of over a million people -- their names are etched in a little silicon chip. As an astrobiology-type person, I'm intrigued by the thought that those names and that spacecraft will far outlive the Earth. When the Sun becomes a red giant and scorches the Earth, that spacecraft and those names will still be floating around the galaxy somewhere.

It's getting to be a fairly old spacecraft and it's been having a number of issues; none of them are considered life-threatening,