Top 58 Space Astronaut Quotes
#1. I stayed in the astronaut program until 1993. People ask me why I left. I thought I had a lot of things to contribute that would be difficult to do if I stayed. I thought I could have a stronger voice as an advocate for space exploration. So I ended up starting my own technology consulting company.
Mae Jemison
#2. If we adopt the same collaborative mindset and practices that got to the moon and back, and that built the International Space Station, we can alleviate poverty - and do much more.
Ron Garan
#3. The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.
Mary Roach
#4. Life as an astronaut in space is a very interesting one. There are things we all take for granted here on earth, like gravity, that can make things a bit challenging. One of the fun things about getting here is the zero gravity and floating around. But it also makes things very difficult.
Kevin A. Ford
#5. I'd love to go back to space, I don't know any astronaut who doesn't want to.
Helen Sharman
#6. From day one, I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts. As a pilot, I flew in the sky. Now that I am an astronaut, I will fly in space.
Liu Yang
#7. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out, and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.
Ed Mitchell
#8. As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.
Mary Roach
#9. 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.
Laurel Clark
#10. And in that moment, I was hit with the realization that this delicate layer of atmosphere is all that protects every living thing on Earth from perishing in the harshness of space.
Ron Garan
#11. I was a frustrated astronaut all my life. I grew up at a time when space seemed to have no boundaries, and lots of us presumed humans would be living on the moon and landing on Mars.
David Mackay
#12. We are limited only by our imagination and our will to act.
Ron Garan
#13. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. And my own passion was that I wanted to be a film director. I realized that being an astronaut was not going to be an option, so I said, "Well, I'm going to be a director and do films in space."
Alfonso Cuaron
#14. Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration:
Mary Roach
#15. Every single astronaut who has come back from space comes back determined to do more to protect it.
Richard Branson
#16. I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut.
Alfonso Cuaron
#17. I looked and looked but I didn't see God.
[Speaking about, in 1961, becoming the first human to enter space.]
Yuri Gagarin
#18. I want to launch a globe into space just to mess with the astronauts.
Demetri Martin
#19. On the wall of his rehabilitation room was a picture of the space shuttle blasting off, autographed by every astronaut now at NASA. On top of the picture it says, "We found nothing is impossible." That should be our motto.
Christopher Reeve
#20. I wanted to be an astronaut and wanted to go to space camp, but then I found out that I was too short to become an astronaut. My mom really made me believe that if I worked hard enough and if I really wanted to do it, I could do it.
Soleil Moon Frye
#21. One thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure.
Sally Ride
#22. Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don't find "anal" on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn't really use words like anal. Unless they have to.
Mary Roach
#23. My obsession with outer space is my way of being different. I make astronaut music. It takes an astronaut so long to get to space - that's how long it takes to catch up on my music.
Nayvadius Cash
#24. At middle age, I decide to give up on my dream of being an astronaut and follow my second, to be a writer. Also, I heard there was no smoking in the space station.
Michael Kroft
#25. As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes.
Chris Hadfield
#26. An astronaut is someone who's able to make good decisions quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter. I didn't miraculously become one either, after just eight days in space. But I did get in touch with the fact that I didn't even know what I didn't know.
Chris Hadfield
#27. A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.
Bill Gaede
#28. Weightlessness was wonderful, and I was surprised at how natural it felt.
Ron Garan
#29. Curiosity is the essence of our existence.
Gene Cernan
#30. So modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.
David Eagleman
#31. As a kid, I was obsessed with space. Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that, I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me.
Taylor Wilson
#32. I loved dinosaurs, I loved space, and I thought maybe I'd be the first paleo-astronaut.
Bill Maris
#33. A partner's different perspective is valuable, but the very fact that it is different means that it will require work, humility, time, and resources to incorporate that perspective. At times, this will require checking one's pride at the door.
Ron Garan
#34. I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door.
David Mackay
#35. Open collaboration encourages greater accountability, which in turn fosters trust.
Ron Garan
#36. I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.
Chuck Yeager
#37. It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
Neil Armstrong
#39. It was reported today that the machine on board the International Space Station that turns urine into drinking water has been fixed. After hearing this, an astronaut said, 'Wait. You mean that wasn't lemon Tang?'
Conan O'Brien
#40. At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone, there was a constant surveillance by UFOs.
Scott Carpenter
#41. I like acting for now. But after seeing Apollo 13, what I really want to do is to be an astronaut. I'm dying to go to a space camp next summer!
Natalie Portman
#42. This was exactly what I experienced in space: immense gratitude for the opportunity to see Earth from this vantage, and for the gift of the planet we've been given.
Ron Garan
#43. Sometimes people ask me how difficult the astronaut program was, but being in Sierra Leone, being responsible for the health of more than 200 people, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at age 26 - that prepared me to take on a lot of different challenges.
Mae Jemison
#44. I was born in 1960 and can still tell you the name of every astronaut from Mercury to Apollo. If I had a chance, I'd love to go into space on one of the privately developed space crafts.
Eric Betzig
#45. My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.
Michael J. Massimino
#46. Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.
Sylvia Earle
#48. We're all astronauts, really, aren't we; interstellar astronauts, travelling so far into the blackness we can never return.
S.K. Tremayne
#49. To be one of the world's top space robotic arm operators is a necessary skill for an astronaut, but it doesn't have much carry-over.
Chris Hadfield
#50. At this point I thought 'We made it,' by which I meant 'We survived.' I also was acutely aware that my childhood dream of flying into space had just come true.
Ron Garan
#51. I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.
Christa McAuliffe
#52. Sometimes when people find out I'm an astronaut, they ask, "So what do you do when you're not flying in space?
Chris Hadfield
#53. To me, there is something superbly symbolic in the fact that an astronaut, sent up as assistant to a series of computers, found that he worked more accurately and more intelligently than they. Inside the capsule, man is still in charge.
Adlai Stevenson
#54. Although as a boy I had dreamed about going into space, I had completely forgotten about that until one day I received a call from an astronaut, who suggested that I should join the program.
David M. Brown
#55. Every astronaut flew into space for a living. But while NASA has not solved the security problems, I would not put me back into a shuttle - and no other astronaut. The confidence is shaken.
Ulrich Walter
#56. I lay on my back, surprised at how calm and focused I felt, strapped to four and a half million pounds of explosives.
Ron Garan
#57. But being a space flight participant is not really the same as being an astronaut. An astronaut is someone who's able to make good decisions quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter.
Chris Hadfield
#58. Not everyone can be an astronaut and go into space, some people with sufficient resources can purchase and fly sub-orbitally thanks to various companies and for more money (considerably) fly into orbit.
Buzz Aldrin
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