These NASA quotes will inspire you. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration[NASA] is America’s civil space program and the global leader in space exploration.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging NASA quotes, NASA sayings, and NASA proverbs.
Best NASA Quotes
- “For NASA, space is still a high priority.” ~ Dan Quayle
- “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “When NASA dreams big America dreams big. People…kids say, ‘I want to do that when I grow up’. Because you want to do what’s visible to you.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“Failure is not an option.” ~ Gene Kranz
- “When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — Barack Obama charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.” ~ Charles Bolden
- “America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station, and to do it within a decade.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” ~ John F. Kennedy
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“This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” ~ Neil Armstrong
- “Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.” ~ Michio Kaku
- “For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means” ~ Gordon Cooper
- “Would a NASA reality show “Lunar Shore” be more popular than “Jersey Shore?” Civilization’s future depends on that answer.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“They said you can’t go to the moon. They said you can’t put cheese inside a pizza crust, but NASA did it. They had to because the cheese kept floating off in space.” ~ Stephen Colbert
- “NASA asked me to create meals for the space shuttle. Thai chicken was the favorite. I flew in a fake space shuttle, but I have no desire to go into space after seeing the toilet.” ~ Rachael Ray
- “My vision is a future for humanity where we will be completely free to pursue activities outside of our planet.” ~ Franklin Chang Diaz
- “The greatest gain from space travel consists in the extension of our knowledge. In a hundred years this newly won knowledge will pay huge and unexpected dividends.” ~ Wernher von Braun
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“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.” ~ Bill Nye
- “That’s what we want to do here at Johnson Space Center. I think what we have always brought to NASA and brought to the country is trying to push the boundaries, trying to go to the next level.” ~ Ellen Ochoa
- “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.” ~ Neil Armstrong
- “Astronauts have been stuck in low-Earth orbit, boldly going nowhere. American attempts to kick-start a new phase of lunar exploration have stalled amid the realization that NASA’s budget is too small for the job.” ~ Paul Davies
- “Do you realize that the 850 billion dollar bank bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA. And so when someone says, ‘We don’t have enough money for this space probe.’ No, it’s not that you don’t have enough money. It’s that the distribution of money that you’re spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“When NASA says they’re going into space, they don’t mean up and back. They mean orbit.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “If NASA were advancing a space frontier there would be challenges you’ve never seen before. You have to be creative and you have to patent some new idea. You get to Mars…well, how do we get the water from the soil? I gotta invent a new device that will do that. And the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how can we use that? Can we breathe the oxygen from the carbon dioxide?” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson , NASA quotes about Mars
- “In just one year, the expenditure of the U.S.’s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “We need to look at NASA, not as a handout, but as an investment.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “Some people said, “we don’t want to risk astronauts lives anymore, we need to stop doing this”. The astronauts don’t feel that wayWe fly for our country, we fly for humanity, we fly for exploration, we fly for a variety of reasons, and we don’t stop flying because we have accidents.” ~ Eileen Collins
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“NASA is an utterly fascinating place, and the fact that the buildings look so anonymous almost make it more fascinating. You walk by a generic office-park-looking building, and you have no idea what’s going on inside.” ~ Moby
- “NASA sends probe to Uranus, people everywhere giggle.” ~ Colin Mochrie
- “My advice for an aspiring astronaut is to really follow your passion. I mean, study something that interests you, but also qualifies you to apply. NASA recruits from a wide variety of backgrounds. I know people who have applied to be an astronaut who ask me, well should I do this or should I do that. And I said, you know, it doesn’t matter. The basic requirements are you have to be in good health, and you have to have a good heart, I mean in a technical way, not to be a kind person, well that helps. Study something that you like and do well in it.” ~ Leroy Chiao
- “The Monkees are to the Beatles what ‘Star Trek’ is to NASA. They are both totally valid in their contexts.” ~ Micky Dolenz
- “It’s been said that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there the last time.” ~ John Seely Brown
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“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.” ~ Elon Musk
- “All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “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
- “No one with a living room radio that was a piece of furniture at the time would say, gee. I want to carry that around on my hip pocket. That was not a thought until NASA initiated this whole exercise. So there’s an influence that’s not just spinoff.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “The miniaturization of electronics, which ultimately was driven by the marketplace, was started by NASA, because it costs money to get something into orbit. So you want to trim your electronics, miniaturize your electronics, miniaturize your satellites.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“I ended up realizing that NASA was unlikely to get me into space, or get me to the moon or beyond, and I needed some other way to drive this.” ~ Peter Diamandis
- “NASA is doing nothing but development. They’re not doing research in manned spaceflight at all and I see no reason for them to do that because we already know that it will work and we already know exactly how it will work.” ~ Burt Rutan
- “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.” ~ Jim Lovell
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“A NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut can’t be creative. He has to follow a predetermined detailed checklist written by an engineer and if he gets a little creative he’ll never fly again.” ~ Burt Rutan
- “I believe that space travel will one day become as common as airline travel is today. I’m convinced, however, that the true future of space travel does not lie with government agencies — NASA is still obsessed with the idea that the primary purpose of the space program is science — but real progress will come from private companies competing to provide the ultimate adventure ride, and NASA will receive the trickle-down benefits.” ~ Buzz Aldrin , NASA quotes about 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.” ~ Neil Armstrong
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“You may have heard this, that NASA discovered water on Mars When he heard about the water on Mars, President Bush said, ‘Is it regular or unleaded?'” ~ Craig Kilborn
- “The Al Gore movie cashed in on his personality and the question of where he had been in the six years since his failed US presidential bid. The same movie starring any NASA scientist would have lost money.” ~ Randy Olson
- “I was born in 1958, the same year NASA was established, which I like to think of as not a coincidence. I was 11 when they landed on the moon, Apollo Eleven. And, of course, everybody in the whole world was watching that. But I can tell you, at that time, nobody ever asked a girl, ‘Is that something you want to grow up and do?'” ~ Ellen Ochoa
- “I went to see Chicago after I finished shooting, and say what you want about it, but that thing was so meticulously planned. It was planned like NASA planned its trips to the moon. It made me feel like some sort of horrible dilettante.” ~ Guy Maddin
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“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.” ~ Robert Ballard
- “My neighbor’s not even listening to me. He’s all excited about some garden hose he bought at Brookstone. He’s convinced it was designed by NASA. “Actually, it’s got two nozzles, one for the hot and one for the…” Really? Is it long enough to go around both our necks and the chimney so we can tandem jump off of this? That’s all I really care about you and your little garden hose.” ~ Bill Burr
- “I was not the commander, I was a junior person, so once both were outside, I followed my leader, because we (NASA) had not put together detailed jobs of people outside. I believe it could have been improved. But it was very successful for what it was.” ~ Buzz Aldrin
- “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.” ~ Sheila Jackson Lee
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“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
- “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.” ~ Marc Garneau
- “We’d never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn’t been for space exploration and NASA.” ~ James Lovelock , NASA quotes space exploration
- “NASA will send up a big sunshade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.” ~ James Lovelock
- “I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we’re the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“The 20-G Centrifuge is our largest facility certified for use by humans. Its capabilities make it a unique NASA resource and a very versatile research tool that is ideal for developing health-maintenance activities for astronauts.” ~ Jeff Smith
- “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.” ~ Mary Roach
- “I would require every producer of food to follow and have enforced a standard safety plan. We know how to produce safe food. It has a horrible name; it’s called HACCP – Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point – and this was a food safety system that was developed for NASA so that astronauts wouldn’t get sick in outer space. If you just think about what it might be like to have food poison under conditions of zero gravity, you don’t even want to think about it.” ~ Marion Nestle
- “The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.” ~ Fred Brooks
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“There are many Iranians working at NASA. One of the engineers involved with the spaceship that went to Mars is an Iranian.” ~ Farah Diba
- “There’s a story about when President Lyndon Johnson visited NASA and as he was walking the halls he came across a janitor who was cleaning up a storm, like the Energizer bunny with a mop in his hand. The president walked over to the janitor and told him he was the best janitor he has ever seen and the janitor replied, “Sir, I’m not just a janitor, I helped put a man on the moon.” See, even though he was cleaning floors he had a bigger purpose and vision for his life. This is what kept him going and helped him excel in his job.” ~ Jon Gordon , NASA quotes about life
- “I often use the iPhone as an example of how governments shape markets because what makes the iPhone ‘smart’ and not stupid is what you can do with it. And yes, everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touch screen display and even the SIRI voice-activated system – all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA!” ~ Mariana Mazzucato
- “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.” ~ Buzz Aldrin
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“NASA is increasingly not the future of space exploration. I love the fact that we have private-sector folks devoting a lot of money to stimulate innovation in space technology.” ~ Ian Bremmer
- “NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide – CO2. This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists.” ~ Walter Cunningham
- “But, when it comes to global warming, the public-at-large really doesn’t know whom to believe anymore. And NASA has contributed to that confusion.” ~ Walter Cunningham
