Neil Armstrong Quotes

“But Neil also knew that until science developed the means to travel at faster interplanetary speeds, Mars-bound astronauts would arrive as blubbering idiots from radiation poisoning—no ship headed to Mars today could carry enough lead to protect its crew.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“The Apollo trips alone leapedfrogged humans 50 years ahead in science and knowledge. But what most astounded Neil was not that we went to the moon, but that we didn’t stay.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“Inside were some of the moon rocks harvested by Neil and Buzz. They were still preserved in a 4.6-billion-year-old lunar vacuum and once removed amazed and startled geologists marveled at the charcoal-colored lumps and dust that one called, “burnt potatoes!” Now they were looking at a mystery. It would be another three decades before computer models would tell them an infant Earth and moon were products of a solar system smashup. An incoming planetoid had gouged a great wound into our planet leaving it aflame in the hottest of fires and wracked with quakes. A wounded Earth’s gravity grabbed the planetoid and dragged the nearly destroyed space traveler into an orbit around its surface where it recollected and repaired its wounds to become the moon we see today. Most of the heaviest elements from the planetoid, especially its iron, remained deep inside the now-molten Earth, beginning a long settling motion to the core of our infant world. The impact sped up Earth to a full rotation once every 24 hours. The geologists in the lunar receiving laboratory had no idea that they were looking at scorched soil from the twins that created our Earth-Moon system. What they would soon learn from the materials brought back by Apollo 11 and the landings that followed was that Earth and the moon are much alike, and lunar-orbiting spacecraft mapping the moon would cast aside their long belief that our lunar neighbor was without water.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“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 20th, 1969 (20:17:39 Greenwich Mean Time).”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“It was reported the new president Richard Nixon was concerned that some overly ambitious Apollo commander, thinking this was his one and only shot at landing on the moon, might take unwise chances. Mr. Nixon, a space program supporter, asked the NASA administrator to tell Neil Armstrong if conditions became unsafe for the landing he was to abort, and the new president promised him he would get another mission—he would get another attempt to land on the moon. Neil liked that, but knew he would never take chances with the lives of his crew. I asked Neil if the story was true. “Yep,” he said, adding, “I was also told he made the same commitment to later crews.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“The nickname “Buzz” originated in childhood: the younger of his two elder sisters mispronounced “brother” as “buzzer,” and this was shortened to Buzz. It was also a term used by pilots when they “buzzed”—flew low over buildings and such to announce their arrival. The name set well with the aspiring young pilot, who in 1988 made it his legal first name.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“The lunar module would not be ready for its first flight test for four or five months, but they had a perfectly good Apollo, and Deke turned to Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman, later saying, “The sonofabitch almost turned handsprings when I told him there was a possibility Apollo 8 would go all the way to the moon.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“The consensus among those who knew Neil was that he takes a long time coming to a decision on the ground and when he makes a decision that is that! But, say the astronauts, in the cockpit there’s no pilot faster. He can read a problem and immediately correct it. That’s Neil Armstrong. Neil in the Gemini spacecraft learning the machine he would fly.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“Alan Shepard’s successful suborbital spaceflight had settled questions for President John Kennedy who accepted that Russian rockets and spacecraft were bigger. But he was coming to realize the Soviets weren’t better because their technology could only build large nuclear warheads. They needed monstrous missiles to carry their monstrous bombs, but not America. With the significant breakthrough in size reduction in America’s hydrogen bomb warheads, the same bang could be carried to any target by a rocket a third of the size. For this reason President Kennedy was convinced we were actually ahead of the Russians in rocketry, space vehicles, and the digital computer. He felt confident that in any technological race we could beat them. And Kennedy was ready to take what many considered a huge gamble.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“we”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“From deep within the solar system a large planetoid was headed Earth’s way. It was on a collision course and it was unbelievably massive—possibly the size of Mars itself. Had there been humans on Earth then they would have spotted this intruder millions of miles out. They would have watched it grow in size night after night. Soon it would have filled the sky. There would have been no escape, no reprieve. Instantly they would have been staring doom in its face as—at an oblique angle—the planetoid squashed the young Earth.”
― Jay Barbree, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight

“The moment of twilight is simply beautiful.”
― John Glenn, Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight