NASA Quotes

All the NASA footage is in the public domain, and it’s so beautiful; it’s really stunning.

If you compare NASA’s annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA’s budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.

Nothing focuses your mind quite like flying a jet. That’s one reason NASA requires that astronauts fly T-38s: it forces us to concentrate and prioritize in some of the same ways we need to in a rocket ship.

NASA should start thinking about this planet.

NASA should not be developing its own proprietary version of capabilities it could purchase commercially at much lower cost, especially when we know the agency‘s bureaucratic tendencies will be to view the commercial versions as competitors to kill.

When I was a kid, I was a bit of a space geek. I loved the space program and all things NASA. I would read books about our solar system; I had pictures of the Space Shuttle on my bedroom wall. And yes, I even went to Space Camp.

There’s been a lot of discussion about NASA culture and changing that. I think our culture has always been one of trying to do a very difficult job and do it well.

How fantastic that the American ingenuity of NASA scientists got us to Mars. It makes me proud to be an American. I can’t get enough of these images from when the probe touched down. These scientists are American heroes.

I’ve been collecting articles on extremophile bacteria for at least the last ten years. I find them fascinating, whether they live in boiling pools at Yellowstone, around thermal vents at the floors of the oceans, or on Mars, where NASA has been searching for them as the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

Asteroid detection, tracking, and defense of our planet is something that NASA, its interagency partners, and the global community take very seriously.

It has only been within my lifetime that asteroids have been considered a credible threat to our planet. And since then, there’s been a focused effort underway to discover and catalog these objects. I am lucky enough to be part of this effort. I’m part of a team of scientists that use NASA’s NEOWISE telescope.

Going to Mars would make NASA great again.

I had never used the prefix ‘Dr.’ with my name, but when I started with NASA, I had to. Otherwise, I could not get past the secretaries.

The U.S. federal government may be going broke, but it’s not because of NASA.

NASA has been scattered to the four winds.

In 1983, NASA invited Canada to fly three payload specialists, in part because we had contributed the robotic arm that is used on the shuttle.

Many of us in Congress have been calling on the Administration to articulate a bold mission for NASA. It seems that the President is answering that call. I wholeheartedly support his vision for going back to the moon, and from there to worlds beyond.

I think it’s really a sign of great American strength that we do invest the money we do in technology, in these hard projects, in NASA.

As a card-carrying space nerd and NASA’s chief scientist, I love space movies, from ‘Star Trek‘ to ‘Star Wars‘ to my all-time favorite – ‘The Dish‘, an Australian comedy that celebrates that first moment when Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of our moon.

I’m substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They’re sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they’re hitting back and forth.

I got a hold of NASA, four times, I said, ‘I want to become an astronaut.’ But nobody would take me. I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up.

To me, NASA is kind of the magical kingdom. I was sort of a geek, and you go there, and there are just these wondrously strange things and people.

NASA has made a difference.

I knew I wanted to be a part of NASA in any case, and so I chose my goals in education to be consistent with working at NASA even as, you know, a scientist.

It seemed to me that NASA, especially Goddard, was the place where I could carry out the dreams that I had, which were to push forward an experiment that would measure the big bang radiation better than anyone had ever tried before. Therefore, it seemed like the perfect place to go.

There was a time when Pluto – which NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led – was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other – possibly inhabited – planets.

NASA needs to focus on the things that are really important and that we do not know how to do. The agency is a pioneering force, and that is where its competitive advantage lies.

There’s a silly notion that failure‘s not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

The mission of NASA’s Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass (‘transit‘) in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds.

Rather than being an impediment, NASA can and should be the driver of commerce, the provider of the technology necessary to make some big money in space. The truth is that private enterprise already has a huge presence up there.

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

NASA’s been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve, and it’s sad that we are turning the program in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation it provides to young people.

After World War II, defending America in the modern world required new intelligence agencies, the unification of the armed services under a massive new Defense Department, and later the creation of new civilian organizations with some defense functions, such as NASA and the Energy Department.

You think NASA is going to be cutting edge, but they’ve got so many buildings that are just left over from the ’60s. It’s old.

For long-duration exploration missions, NASA is looking for folks with a lot of operational, hands-on experience, people who have been in field-type situations such as military deployments. In my case, I worked in the Congo and in Biosafety Level 4 labs on smallpox.

Me personally – not something to do with NASA – I do think there is a God, and it’s somebody looking out for us and trying to guide us to live a very happy, productive life. There is further meaning. That’s just my thought.

With any luck, by the time NASA’s space probe hits Pluto, you’ll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.

Personally, I’ve got bigger hopes for NASA. I will stipulate it should keep putting telescopes in space so we can figure out where we fit in the universe, and it should also keep building those little robots that can and do.

I’m track 3 with fabulous French dialogue on the ‘Star Is Born‘ album. I’m track 3 ‘NASA’ on Ariana Grande’s album. From ‘All Stars 3,’ went to ‘Drag Race’ three times, never won. Three is my lucky number.

I thought that NASA didn’t take biologists and so nothing would come of it. But I knew I would regret it if I did not apply.

In 2010 and 2012, I won the Democratic nomination in the 22nd Congressional District on the program ‘Save NASA Impeach Obama,’ without any organizational or financial backing from the party.

NASA works for the White House. There are many at NASA that wish they were building a modern replacement for the Shuttle. However, they had marching orders to instead work on other things, some of which should have no place in a research organization.

NASA is my favorite website. The universe with its abstract nature attracts me. The abstract element in my poetry comes from there.

I remember in 1967, when there was that terrible fire on NASA’s Apollo 1 rocket that killed three astronauts, my father made pure oxygen and we lit this tiny cup and burned it. Suddenly, we had an unbelievable jet and a fire. You just could see exactly what had happened.

What we do at NASA is inspiring. It’s reaching, it’s visionary, and it inspires people on Earth to try hard things.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

I have had the privilege to be a member of many high-performance teams at NASA, both on and off the planet.

It is only by freeing NASA from routine human transport to low-Earth orbit that we can afford to once again see American astronauts exploring distant worlds.

My dad worked with Mary Jackson very closely at one point. I knew Katherine Johnson as well. They were all part of this group of black engineers and scientists within this larger NASA community.

The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It’s the U.S.’ ‘other’ space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992.

Obviously I’d like NASA to follow their charter – the exploration of our solar system and beyond. I’d like to see people someday go to Mars.

NASA needs to decide, along with Congress, what our destination is going to be, whether it’s going to be the moon, an asteroid or on to Mars. And we’re building a heavy-lift vehicle to get us there and building the capsules that’s going to be needed to carry the crew.

I’m a major NASA nerd, so I’ve spent a lot of time learning about the space race and the Apollo missions.

Joining NASA was very exciting, but it was the hardest decision I have had to make in my life.

I did not think my chances were very big when I saw some of the other men who were competing for the team. They were a good group, and I had a lot of respect for them. But I decided to give it the old school try and to take some of NASA’s tests.

The one period of glory in NASA was the first nine years when they weren’t a bureaucracy yet… and they haven‘t gotten back to that excitement, that adventurism, and won’t. So, I would take most of the NASA budget, and I would turn it into prizes for private sector.

The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don’t need justification.

I think that when NASA works on a moon shot, they know too well that all of the people working on it must do their job at 110 percent. Sometimes they probably put in 18 hour days, but they’re aiming for the moon, and that’s what counts.

NASA’s myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.

I grew up in this business… A lot of my life has been centered around this question about how NASA is helping us to understand our own home planet… and to understand our place in the universe.

There’s a perspective that I’ve gained as an astronaut that I didn’t get from my science activities. In my science activities, I learned by the seat of my pants. Spending 17 years as an astronaut, I learned the NASA formalism of systems engineering as if my life depended on it. Literally.

The whole Hubble program has just been a fabulous testament to the NASA science community and the NASA astronaut community.

Trillions of dollars in out-of-control entitlement spending cannot be remedied by cuts in NASA, or even in the entire discretionary budget, defense included. Rather, the financial bleeding needs to be staunched where the hole is and nowhere else.

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It’s sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.

If you take all the money we’ve spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles.

At the end of our NASA careers, no one had a place for us in the military.

The head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.

You have to budget time for the inevitable problems that come up with children. You have to always be ahead of the game. If your proposal is due at NASA on Friday, it has to be finished on Wednesday because, on Thursday, it could be fevers and head lice.

NASA is a big organization with a lot of needs that have to be met. So there are a lot of opportunities.

‘Satellite archaeology‘ refers to the use of NASA and commercial high resolution satellite datasets to map and discover past structures, cities, and geological features.

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.

Being at NASA and having the access to both computing capability and satellite observation capability is kind of the ideal research situation to try to understand global climate change.

If NASA is to reach beyond the Moon and someday reach Mars, it must be relieved of the burden of launching people and cargo to low earth orbit. To do that, we must invest more in commercial spaceflight.

When I was at NASA, I had a house on a small private airstrip that we shared between the flying community. I had a hangar in my backyard with my airplane in it so I could just fly from my home.

I can’t think of anything specific growing up that pointed me toward NASA at all. I was interested in the Moon landings just about the same as everyone else of my generation. But I never really thought about being an astronaut or working in space myself.

I didn’t go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.

I want to use the abilities that God has given me to do my job well and support my crewmates and mission and NASA.

The way I see it, commercial interests should manage a lunar base while NASA gets on with the really important task of flying to Mars.

We actually look to the scientific community to kind of come back to NASA and tell us what the priorities should be. And then at NASA, we try to look within our budget and say, ‘What can we accommodate, and what are the most important things for the nation?’

If we gutted NASA Earth Science, it wouldn’t be NOAA or some other agency that would take the lead. It would be the Chinese and the Europeans and the Japanese.

I wound up getting offered a job at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I invented a power supply mechanism for the Galileo space craft which was in orbit around Jupiter until 2003.

There’s no proof of the Earth’s curvature and this fake space agency Nasa use CGI images and every one is different.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

I flew fighters for the Navy in San Diego for three years, went and did my post-graduate education, and then I was a test pilot in Patuxent River, Maryland, for a few years. I was back in the fleet in the Navy when I was selected to come back here to NASA to become an astronaut.

NASA, and all the other spacefaring nations of the world, have agreed to a set of ‘planetary-protection’ principles, aimed at preventing the accidental contamination of another habitable world with organisms from Earth.

This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box.

Fortunately, there’s another handy driver that has manifested itself throughout the history of cultures. The urge to want to gain wealth. That is almost as potent a driver as the urge to maintain your security. And that is how I view NASA going forward – as an investment in our economy.

Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.

Archaeologists use datasets from NASA and commercial satellites, processing the information using various off-the-shelf computer programs. These datasets allow us to see beyond the visible part of the light spectrum into the near, middle, and far infrared.

I interned at NASA for five years, and I grew up in Cape Canaveral, and my grandfather was an engineer on the Mercury capsule, and my grandmother was a software engineer. I literally grew up playing on the Mercury capsule prototypes.

In high school, I was selected for NASA’s Math & Science program. I’d hop on the yellow school bus and head up to Cape Canaveral.

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations – as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

Instead of being able to look at smaller interesting research projects, I am trying to see the links between all the research NASA does. For me, that’s extremely fun because I get to go play and learn about areas of science that I know nothing about.

As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that’s no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem or failing to champion reform.

Science at NASA is all about exploring the endless frontier of the Earth and space.

I do a lot of work with NASA and am involved in research projects studying planetary evolution, Earth-like planets, and potential conditions for life elsewhere.

Cutting NASA education funds would most severely affect students from low- to middle-income families and students from non-Ivy League-level schools.

Boeing, LockMart, and hundreds of other companies, large and small, work in the space business, and they also create new techniques and technology; but they’d be nowhere if NASA and the Department of Defense hadn’t shown the way by funding the first big rockets and satellites.

NASA space scientists have been studying giraffe skin so they can apply what they learn from it to the construction of spacesuits.

I had as much time to prepare for that moon landing as NASA did, and I still was speechless when it happened. It just was so awe-inspiring to actually be able to see the thing through the television that was a miracle in itself.

To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as ‘what NASA does’. This perception is – in many respects – a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.

NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA’s problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length.

I’ve had young women come to me and say that before they watched ‘Voyager’ it didn’t really occur to them that they could be successful in a higher position in the field of science; girls going to MIT, girls pursuing astrophysics with a view to a career in NASA.

I’ve been receiving a lot of emails and messages from folks that say, ‘Hey, my kid saw you and they’re so excited and it’s great that he can look at the NASA TV broadcast and see someone that looks like him,’ and I think that’s important.

When I started working at NASA and understanding what the capabilities really were of the space station and the space program, one of the biggest draws for me was the ability to do experiments in space. We can do a number of experiments where gravity is actually a variable.

When I left NASA, I was looking at how you could use space technologies for developing countries‘ work.

NASA projects often have romantic names that link into a long history of exploration and adventure: Atlantis and Discovery, for example.

We need to be very thoughtful about how we propose to spend the money that NASA does have for space exploration. And we need to be clear that there’s the human spaceflight part of NASA, and there’s the science space part of NASA, and there’s also aeronautics. Those are all very different things that NASA does.

‘The Martian‘ may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.