Glenn's 1962 Mercury flight was fraught with dramatics, from his 'Zero G and I feel fine!' exultation upon entering orbit to his reentry with what was feared was a faulty heat shield. After he safely...

Being an astronaut, there are not a lot of things that have really shocked me in my life.

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.

I think even in bad times it's good to keep some money going into research. And that's the purpose of the whole space program. It's not just exploration and going to see how far we can go out into...

Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and...

My view is that we should go back to the moon, build up the infrastructure to make flights there commonplace - be comfortable with it - then use that infrastructure to expand and go to Mars.

The flight crew for the orbital mission has been picked, and I'm not on it. Of course I've been feeling pretty low for the past few days. All of us are mad because Glenn was picked.

A lot of the futuristic space stuff seemed to me to be a very cool form of science-fiction, so that was my first real baptism in the genre.

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

On Mir, the lights kept going out because it had developed so many electrical problems.

I cannot wait to get up there and experience space travel for the first time. It will be a dream come true.

I would suspect strongly that over a period of time, if we put our mind to going to Mars, it will be a consortium of several countries.

Just like the bones and muscles, the heart is designed to work in one gravity here on Earth, so when you put the heart in space, it operates differently and changes shape.

We are going to mint new astronauts from all communities. We want to influence public policy and opinion... by changing the mindset.

Our focus is to get citizen astronauts to experience the 'overview effect,' return to Earth, and then impact their communities.

After floating for nine and a half months in space, gravity is not your friend.

NASA headquarters belong in Ohio.

Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States.

Companies that have the capability to settle space don't have the ambition and companies that have the ambition don't have the capability. Voyager was founded to do something about that.

The Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems, too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work.

It was the era when women were in the kitchen. Space travel was the old-boy network.

When the first American steps on the red dust of Mars, it's going to be because of computer scientists.

It's odd that invoking the possibility of alien influences should itself be a sign of madness. I don't see the need for it to explain history on earth, but I can't see any reason why the universe...

SpaceX is one of many companies helping us reach new horizons - and they're using Florida as their base to do it.

The reality is that we know that this universe, that our galaxy, has billions of stars. We know that stars have planets. So the likelihood that there is life somewhere else to me is just absolutely...

Hopefully, we will get more and more people interested in doing research in space. I think eventually it's also going to be a great commercial market.

An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket...

There's nothing I would like more than to watch a manned Mars landing.

One of my early heroes was Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

It's hard for us to really understand the immensity so far of the conquest of space.