Quotes from Alan Shepard

They say any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

Of course, in our grade school, in those days, there were no organized sports at all. We just went out and ran around the school yard for recess.

I'd like to say I was smart enough to finish six grades in five years, but I think perhaps the teacher was just glad to get rid of me.

The pilot looked at his cues of attitude and speed and orientation and so on and responded as he would from the same cues in an airplane, but there was no way it flew the same. The simulators had showed us that.

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

I must admit, maybe I am a piece of history after all.

Later, in the early teens, I used to ride my bike every Saturday morning to the nearest airport, ten miles away, push airplanes in and out of the hangars, and clean up the hangars.

I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.

You have to be there not for the fame and glory and recognition and being a page in a history book, but you have to be there because you believe your talent and ability can be applied effectively to operation of the spacecraft.

We worked with the engineers in the design and construction and testing phases in those various areas, then we would get back together at the end of the week and brief each other as to what had gone on.

It is a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

I realized up there that our planet is not infinite. It's fragile. That may not be obvious to a lot of folks, and it's tough that people are fighting each other here on Earth instead of trying to get together and live on this planet. We look pretty vulnerable in the darkness of space.

I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on.

If you don't use your experience, your past is wasted, and you are betraying yourself.

Neil's voice was calm, confident, most of all clear. "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." It was 4:17:42 P.M. EDT, Sunday, July 20, 1969.

The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.

It didn't matter who liked whom, or on what side a man might find himself, because they were all on the side of a world of very definite finite resources, and they would all suffer terrifying consequences if they drained to bare bones the world that had conceived the life of the human race, fostered and nurtured that life, which now threatened to contaminate and destroy—

Eisenhower, his science adviser James Killian, and others in the White House didn't want to be reminded that the rocket was the same damn Jupiter-C that could have placed a satellite in orbit more than a year before Sputnik. The Army was told to keep that information quiet—in fact, to change the name of the rocket, and Jupiter-C became Juno 1.

Glenn's record spoke for itself. He had downed four MiGs in combat, but, more importantly, he had brought back airplanes so badly shot up they were judged not to be flyable by other pilots. Not only had he brought them back and landed them safely, when he climbed from the cockpit the maintenance officers marked these planes as junk, to be cannibalized for parts only.

Whether you are an astronomer or a life scientist, geophysicist, or a pilot, you've got to be there because you believe you are good in your field, and you can contribute, not because you are going to get a lot of fame or whatever when you get back.

Whether you are an astronomer or a life scientist, geophysicist, or a pilot, you've got to be there because you believe you are good in your field, and you can contribute, not because you are going to get a lot of fame or whatever when you get back.

So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.

I think about the personal accomplishment, but there's more of a sense of the grand achievement by all the people who could put this man on the moon.