Neil Armstrong Quotes
284 Neil Armstrong Quotes
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Ed [Edward H.] White [II] and I bought some property together and split it. I built my house on one-half of it, and he built his house on the other. We were good friends, neighbors. Some very traumatic times. You know, I suppose you're much more likely to accept loss of a friend in flight, but it really hurt to lose them in a ground test. That was an indictment of ourselves. I mean, [it happened] because we didn't do the right thing somehow. That's doubly, doubly traumatic.
Neil Armstrong
We were given the gift of time. We didn't want that gift, but we were given months and months to not only fix the spacecraft, but rethink all our previous decisions, plans, and strategies, and change a lot of things, hopefully for the better.
Neil Armstrong
Same thing happened after the Challenger [51-L] explosion. They got time and they fixed a lot of things that needed to be fixed and they never had time to do it before. So we get an added benefit, but we regret the price we had to pay.
Neil Armstrong
[On Test pilots are losing friends often. And you must have lost some friends.] Many, many. That's not the way you want it to happen. Not that it's any less noble.
Neil Armstrong
[On the change in training for the Apollo flights] It was the same, in that it was very goal-oriented. We tried to define it as narrowly as we [could], rather than as broadly as you would in research, because with the time constraints that we were facing then, the desire to get there as fast as we can, we were in a race and that was very evident to us all the time. You wanted to not be diverting your attention in any way to things that you really did not need to worry about. You wanted to focus on all the things that you knew you had to do and had to master. That was the principal difference as we went into the Apollo flights.
Neil Armstrong
I was in Washington [D.C.]. The President was signing the [Outer Space] Treaty with other nations that kept the Moon as the property of all people. It was a non-staking-a-claim treaty.
Neil Armstrong
[On the decision to go to the moon] We were very excited about it. We thought it was very bold … If we could make it work, why, it would make us a giant jump ahead. You remember it was kind of complex because we had to switch crews around and switch some spacecraft and change the order completely. It was kind of a complex process, but it showed a lot of courage on the part of NASA management to make that step.
Neil Armstrong
The lunar module was falling behind, wasn't ready to fly, and they were saying, "What can we do?" We'd been in Earth orbit. What can we do without a lunar module? I don't know which minds first came up with the idea of, "Well, why don't we think about a circumlunar flight with it and leave the lunar module behind."
Neil Armstrong
I suppose that everyone would have concerns, but I don't know that they'd all be the same. People would worry about different things. I remember that one of the things that I was concerned with at the time was whether our navigation was sufficiently accurate, that we could, in fact, devise a trajectory that would get us around the Moon at the right distance without, say, hitting the Moon on the back side or something like that, and if we lost communication with Earth, for whatever reason, could we navigate by ourselves using celestial navigation. We thought we could, but these were undemonstrated skills.
Neil Armstrong
NASA's probably the only organization in history that's been sold a one-power telescope. And that's what we used for doing the sextant shots and doing the star shots.
Neil Armstrong
We didn't know if we could communicate with two vehicles simultaneously at lunar distance. We didn't know whether the radar ranging would work. A lot of things we just didn't know at that point, and I think at that point in time I did not really expect that we'd get the chance to try a lunar landing on that flight. Too many things could go wrong .…
Neil Armstrong
We had lots of those little things which we considered to be non-operational decisions. They were kind of a pain to have to deal with all those, but we had to do it.
Neil Armstrong
There were some things that were done specifically for the benefit of giving the press the opportunity to either talk with us or take pictures of our activities in preparation, and there were other normal things that we were doing, where some access was granted. We probably resented that to some extent, but at the same time we recognized that it was not an unreasonable requirement, and we were certainly willing to accommodate those requirements.
Neil Armstrong
We were going full blast trying to be ready on time, and we just tried to shut anything out of our mind that wasn't focused on our principal objective.
Neil Armstrong
Our first idea was, if we ever needed it for training, was to have the spacecraft—and we didn't know what the spacecraft would look like—but have the spacecraft carried on another vehicle and make that other vehicle be something that would create the conditions that would duplicate the lunar gravity and lunar vacuum and so on. …Our thought was, when the vehicle gets built, we can put it on top of this carrier and they can actually fly it just like they would over the Moon, and they could do it at Edwards or wherever, and learn how it flies.
Neil Armstrong
Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that's when something snaps up and bites you.
Neil Armstrong
As you may know, the lunar module was designed to be able to make an automatic landing, but, to my knowledge, no one ever did.
Neil Armstrong
[On having to leave the moon] I suppose we would have liked a little more time, but when the time came, we had to say, yes, we were ready to go.
Neil Armstrong
It's a very difficult, complex procedure to make sure the computer isn't fooled somehow, or loses information in that process.
Neil Armstrong
If it didn't the error would be due to the alignment… (the drift) of our navigation system. A lot of little things like that which were extremely important and painfully tedious, but absolutely necessary.
Neil Armstrong
We just sort of shut that out all the time that it was outside those spaces that we specifically allocated to the public exposure.
Neil Armstrong
We tried to be as focused as we could, work on the things we could do something about, and not worry about the things that were beyond our ability to change.
Neil Armstrong
We'd look at the books or we'd talk about strategies or "What are we going to do if this happens?" Or, "Are you sure you know how to handle this?" That's where we spent our time.
Neil Armstrong
You know, normally…a lot of unexpected things happen, and usually they're not the ones you practice, but the fact that you practiced a lot of different things puts you in the proper mindset to handle whatever it is that comes along, even if it isn't the one that you've experienced before.
Neil Armstrong
In the time we had available, I think everyone did a pretty credible job of being able to see things that were important and know which samples to pick up and be able to describe to people back on Earth what they were seeing.
Neil Armstrong
[About potential water on the Moon] The thinking is, if it's in perpetual darkness, that is, in a polar crater or low spot so that it never sees the sun, sublimation rates will be extremely low, and there well might be bodies of [ice] there.
Neil Armstrong
We didn't want any rockets firing up when we're accelerating away from the Moon, because that would be wasting fuel. So we would only use the down-pointing rockets because they would be adding to our velocity, would be fuel-efficient. But the result of that is that there's a substantial rocking motion. As you pitch forward, the pitch-up thruster fires, lifts your nose up, then it stops, then the nose falls down again and the rocket fires as though you're in a rocking chair.
Neil Armstrong
They decided to go ahead and have a decontamination facility and put us in quarantine for a period of time equal to the expected incubation time of any disease that could provide an epidemic, twenty-one days from the time we left the surface of the Moon until they let us out
Neil Armstrong
They used samples of the soil and put it in [earth] soil that plants were growing in and exposed it to animals and various kinds of things to see if there were any reaction whatsoever. I don't know to what extent they found anything, but certainly if they found anything, it wasn't serious. After a couple of flights with that quarantine, they discontinued that protection system.
Neil Armstrong
As long as everything was going well and looked right, the engine was operating right, I had control, and we weren't getting into any unusual attitudes or things that looked like they were out of place, I would be in favor of continuing, no matter what the computer was complaining about.
Neil Armstrong
I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation's hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could.
Neil Armstrong
Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.
Neil Armstrong
[On component reliability] I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, "If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it." And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.
Neil Armstrong
When I was working here at the Johnson Space Center [JSC], then the Manned Spacecraft Center [MSC], you could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting time was, because people didn't leave at quitting time in those days. People just worked, and they worked until whatever their job was done, and if they had to be there until five o'clock or seven o'clock or nine-thirty or whatever it was, they were just there. They did it, and then they went home. So four o'clock or four-thirty, whenever the bell rings, you didn't see anybody leaving. Everybody was still working.
Neil Armstrong
The way that made it different from other sectors of the government to which some people are sometimes properly critical is that this was a project in which everybody involved was, one, interested, two, dedicated, and, three, fascinated by the job they were doing. And whenever you have those ingredients, whether it be government or private industry or a retail store, you're going to win.
Neil Armstrong
The late Julian Scheer, who really led the NASA relations with the outside world in many ways, was absolutely adamant that Headquarters never put words in the mouths of their people, not just astronauts, but anybody, that they let people speak for themselves.
Neil Armstrong
[On the Eagle has landed] you know, [it] was a pretty simple statement, talking about stepping off something. Why, it wasn't a very complex thing. It was what it was.
Neil Armstrong
[On there being more pictures of Buzz Aldrin taken on the moon] He's a lot more photogenic than I am.
Neil Armstrong
[On taking pictures on the moon] I think we probably caught a fair share of the things we were supposed to take pictures of, and not too many really bad shots.
Neil Armstrong
I was perhaps probably less concerned about it than a lot of people watching down here on Earth.
Neil Armstrong
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