Robert Crippen Astronaut Quotations

I would truly love to see us go back to the Moon and on to Mars; certainly the shuttle is not the right vehicle to make that happen.

I thought it was going to take a lot more countdowns on the pad. We actually did scrub once, but I figured we'd scrub several times since it's a pretty complicated vehicle.

We were flying on a winged vehicle that would do reentry different than we had ever done before. So all of those were firsts. Test pilots truly love firsts.

For landing, we came in over Edwards about 40,000 feet. We set up for a big circling pattern coming in to land down on the lake bed.

It was only after we got the first maneuver off that I began to enjoy the outside view. We actually could see the external tank out in front of us.

I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67. That program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us.