"The view of the earth from the moon fascinated me--a small disk, 240,000 miles away.....Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don't show from that distance...."

- Frank Borman,
Commander of the Apollo 8 mission (first manned lunar flight).

"It's one of the great delights and memories for me... I felt like I was seeing, woven together, the power and scale of the entire world."

- Kathy Sullivan,
Hall Of Fame astronaut - first U.S. woman to walk in space.

"There are three types of people in this world: people who make things happen, people who watch things happen, and people who just wonder what happened."

- Jim Lovell,
Apollo 13/Apollo 8/Gemini 12 astronaut.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

- Carl Sagan, astronomer, 1934-1996,
describing the Earth from 4 billion miles away, in "Pale Blue Dot".

"Someday in the not-too-distant future, when I listen to an earthling step out onto the surface of Mars or some other planet, just as I listened to Neil step out onto the surface of the Moon, I hope I hear him say: 'I come from the United States of America.'"

- Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot,
addressing the Houses of Congress, September 1969.

"New horizons have been discovered and old boundaries pushed back. It proves that there's never a time when we should stop dreaming. We will continue to challenge our imagination and aim high. The ultimate frontier of space will be a quest for mankind's highest aspirations - the opportunity for individuals, cooperation among nations, and peace on Earth."

- President Ronald Reagan,
upon the return of the first Spacelab mission (STS-9).

Space Quote of the Month - January-February 2004:

"...from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, watching the Moon landings and everything, it was just so incredibly adventurous and exciting to me that I just thought, 'There is no doubt in my mind that that's what I want to do when I grow up.' "