Neil Armstrong Quotes
284 Neil Armstrong Quotes
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I was surprised by the apparent closeness of the horizon. I was surprised by the trajectory of dust that you kicked up with your boot, and I was surprised that even though logic would have told me that there shouldn't be any, there was no dust when you kicked. You never had a cloud of dust there. That's a product of having an atmosphere, and when you don't have an atmosphere, you don't have any clouds of dust.
Neil Armstrong
I was absolutely dumbfounded when I shut the rocket engine off and the particles that were going out radially from the bottom of the engine fell all the way out over the horizon, and when I shut the engine off, they just raced out over the horizon and instantaneously disappeared, you know, just like it had been shut off for a week. That was remarkable. I'd never seen that. I'd never seen anything like that. And logic says, yes, that's the way it ought to be there, but I hadn't thought about it and I was surprised.
Neil Armstrong
We were running low on time, and the geologists, properly, would have liked us to authenticate each sample with photographs from different directions before selecting it so they can identify it. I thought, since we didn't have time to do it, the better part of valor was to just pick up all the different kinds of samples I could as quickly as I could, stick them in the bag and get them back in the craft, and button up shop.
Neil Armstrong
[On the US flag being put on the moon] There were a lot of proposals for what to do on the lunar surface by different people. Some people thought a U.N. [United Nations] flag should be there, and some people thought there should be flags of a lot of nations. In the end, it was decided—and I think the Congress had something to do with it—that this was a United States project and we're not going to stake a claim here, but we ought to let people know that we were here and put a U.S. flag.
Neil Armstrong
[On the US flag going to the moon] My job was to get the flag there. I was less concerned about whether that was the right artifact to place. I let other, wiser minds than mine make those kind of decisions, and I had no problem with it.
Neil Armstrong
I do not believe that, at least with my eyes, there would be any man-made object that I could see. I have not yet found somebody who has told me they've seen the Wall of China from Earth orbit.
Neil Armstrong
We were so happy that we had completed that flight and essentially got almost all our objectives on it, and it allowed the guys in the next flight, subsequent flights, to do far more aggressive science and exploration and so on. So we didn't care what they wanted us to do. We'd have been pleased to do anything at that point.
Neil Armstrong
I recognize that I'm portrayed as staying out of the public eye, but from my perspective it doesn't seem that way, because I do so many things, I go so many places, I give so many talks, I write so many papers that, from my point of view, it seems like I don't know how I could do more. But I recognize that from another perspective, outside, I'm only able to accept less than 1 percent of all the requests that come in, so to them it seems like I'm not doing anything. But I can't change that.
Neil Armstrong
[On Washington] It's a frustrating place for me because so much coordination and greasing the skids goes on in Washington that by the time you've gotten around to everybody, the first guy's forgotten what the subject was. It's really hard to get things done there, and it's amazing to me that anybody can get things rolling from Washington, just because of the nature of the place.
Neil Armstrong
[On his teaching job and finding the governance difficult] I stayed in that job longer than any job I'd ever had up to that point, but I decided it was time for me to go on and try some other things.
Neil Armstrong
[On the space program kind of petering out and losing interest instead of continuing to ride the wave.] I think it's predominantly the responsibility of the human character. We don't have a very long attention span, and needs and pressures vary from day to day, and we have a difficult time remembering a few months ago, or we have a difficult time looking very far into the future. We're very "now" oriented. I'm not surprised by that. I think we'll always be in space, but it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases it will take external factors or forces which we can't control and can't anticipate that will cause things to happen or not happen. Nevertheless, looking back, we were really very privileged to live in that thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself and what he might become and where he might go. So I'm very thankful that we got to see that and be part of it.
Neil Armstrong
[On the Challenger disaster] It was a national tragedy, but we learned a great deal from it, and the subsequent Shuttle program has benefited greatly from the things that we learned and the things that we were able to do in improving the Shuttle during the time period that it was being redesigned.
Neil Armstrong
[On the Apollo program closing in 1972. And whether it was surprising that we haven't gone back to the Moon in so long, and did you ever imagine that it would take so long for people to return, for us to return?] Had you asked me that question thirty years ago, I probably would have said, no, I can't imagine that we'll make such a small number of steps over the next three decades. But looking back on it, I find it fairly understandable in the light of conflicting requirements for resources that the country has. It has a lot of other important challenges. I suspect that we'll get some chances. And there have been remarkable things done. If you look back and see where we've gone in the unmanned side, the probes that we've investigated the outer planets and comets, landed on an asteroid, just what opened up with the Hubble [Space Telescope] and others, the known volume of our environment by millions of light years, it's remarkable what has happened in the last thirty years, and I think we'll get some more chances.
Neil Armstrong
[On using his own telescope] No, but I often enjoy looking at the night sky.
Neil Armstrong
There's an increasing interest to go back to the Moon. There's been enough time now that there are a lot of persuasive reasons why we could benefit from a return visit.
Neil Armstrong
I personally hope that we'll go on to Mars. I think that will create enormous excitement and increased understanding of at least the near part of the solar system.
Neil Armstrong
I can't predict what will happen. What happens is going to depend on a variety of forces and functions that can't be controlled. It's like herding cats.
Neil Armstrong
[On his views of the future] I'm having a little trouble with next month right now. [Laughter] It's fun to look ahead, but candidly, I don't have the ability that some of those wonderful science fiction writers of past generations had. They turned out to be quite perceptive in many ways, and I wish I had a fraction of that ability.
Neil Armstrong
I have a complete set of H. G. Wells, and in reading it now, I find I'm less enthusiastic about his writings than I was when I was a much younger man. But nevertheless, the creative ideas that they have put forth, that have caused a thousand … of other people to think in new ways, has been very important to the progress of civilization.
Neil Armstrong
I thought 2001, which was many decades ago now, was a very fine film, very authentic in terms of the way space looks and the way vehicles move and trajectories and so on. Many of the more recent space fiction movies have much less realism than 2001 did. They're more exciting, but not realistic.
Neil Armstrong
My expectation is that we're not going to run out of new stuff to look at.
Neil Armstrong
[On whether there ever been an individual who's really had a major effect on the way that you've decided to look at life and the way that you want to live your life and carry yourself, whether as a teacher or father or] I think it's the summation of the influence of twenty or fifty people, each of which was significant, but not overpowering.
Neil Armstrong
I was certainly aware of the traumas that the country was experiencing at that time, and I believed that those problems were ones with which I was poorly equipped to contribute.
Neil Armstrong
I've always believed that however attractive it might be to get into areas that are interesting, you shouldn't do it if you're not qualified.
Neil Armstrong
I'm reminded of the Apollo 13 movie, which I thought was an exceptionally good movie. I thought in all the essential elements of that flight and its aftermath … were accurate. They did take literary license, and appropriately so, because there's no way an audience can follow as many people as we had working on the problem. You have to cut it down to some ten or fifteen people so that the audience can remember who's doing what. I thought that they did a good job of that. But each of those one individuals who was doing something in the movie was probably really fifteen people doing that kind of stuff.
Neil Armstrong
NASA, like many organizations, [has] a continually evolving character. It centralizes and then decentralizes, and centralizes then it decentralizes. In my recollection, it probably went through five cycles like that.
Neil Armstrong
[At NASA] When the new guy comes in, why, he thinks we ought to do something a little different than we have, and changes the reporting relationships or the responsibilities' allocation. It's no different in the commercial world. They do similar things in industry, go through the same cycles, and that's neither right nor wrong. It's just the way things are.
Neil Armstrong
[On operating the space suit on the moon] Everything was easier than expected. It was easier to walk. It was easier to maintain balance. We didn't have as much trouble with the temperatures inside the suit as we thought we might have. I can hardly say good enough things about the way the suit and the backpack, the so-called PLSS [portable life support system], operated, fully up to our expectations and better.
Neil Armstrong
I'd say throughout my seventeen years at NACA and NASA, a very large percentage of my time was involved in real engineering work throughout that entire time period. I found that other former engineers who had become senior managers at NASA still occasionally tried to be engineers now and then.
Neil Armstrong
The requirement was to fix that so it didn't happen again
Neil Armstrong
You've got to expect some of these things are going to go wrong, and we always need to prepare ourselves for handling the unexpected. And you just hope those unexpected things aren't something that you can't cope with.
Neil Armstrong
Throughout Apollo, everybody I knew was always saying, "What if?" and, "Is it possible that this could happen?" And, "What will we do?" Just that process of continually questioning built your confidence in your ability to handle whatever comes along.
Neil Armstrong
I can't be critical of your generation, because I recall when I was a teenager, a boy, I thought that everything that happened before I was born was old ancient history, and I really didn't think I needed to know all about it. But with respect to aviation history, I really enjoyed it. I really learned all I could. But I wasn't a big fan necessarily of everything else. So I can't be critical of some other generation. I suspect you'll come along, given a little chance.
Neil Armstrong
Americans take a great deal of pride in Robert Goddard's development of liquid propellant rockets, but the reality is, at the time, his work was ridiculed by some, including the New York Times, and only lightly supported.
Neil Armstrong
Most people could not see much practical use for a rocket. It didn't run for very long, had the world's worst fuel consumption, and it seemed to be prone on destroying itself one way or another.
Neil Armstrong
The possibility of artificial satellites was really fairly widely discussed within the scientific community, but still it was a great shock to most Americans when, in October of 1957, Sputnik sailed across the night sky, and people could actually watch it. The space age had begun, and we weren't a part of it. Americans were embarrassed, and for the first time ever, people began talking seriously about people going into space.
Neil Armstrong
Sputnik had changed the world. Hypersonic was being pushed aside in favor of sending a man all the way into orbit. All of the configurations that had been competing were too heavy to be lifted to orbit by existing rockets, products of the Cold War, which were designed to carry warheads over oceans. Max Faget and Paul Purser of Langley argued that if we were to get a man into orbit soon, the only choice, the only reasonable choice, was a ballistic shape lifted by an ICBM booster. The Soviets had reached the same conclusion.
Neil Armstrong
The Gemini added onboard rocket propulsion so we could maneuver in space, and it had an onboard digital computer. Digital computers weren't so highly regarded in those days. They could be accurate, but they were interminably slow. This one didn't have any gigs or any megs; it had 4K of memory. No screen, just one seven-digit register for input and output. But Gemini crews could navigate.
Neil Armstrong
For the first time, knew how to get to a destination without asking for directions. Using all this computing power, they took great pride in controlling their entry into the atmosphere, the trajectory, and landing precisely close to the ship that was awaiting them. And as Chris said, I landed (Gemini 8) near Okinawa, but my intended target had been the Caribbean. I doubt the record will ever be broken.
Neil Armstrong
Apollo proved that humans were not forever a prisoner of Earth's gravity. We could leave our own planet and go to other celestial destinations, and Americans were no longer second best.
Neil Armstrong
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