Rocket Men Quotes

“After the meal, Borman dropped me off at my hotel, then went to visit his wife at the nursing home where she lives. As he drove away, it seemed to me strange—I felt I’d come to know Susan as well as I had Frank, despite having met her for just a few minutes, despite the fact that she had been too ill to speak. When I returned home and transcribed the tapes of my interviews, I understood why. Borman spoke of Susan constantly; there didn’t seem an aspect of his life he could explain without discussing how much she meant to him or how much he loved her. I’d heard the same from Lovell and Anders about their wives. When I discovered that Apollo 8 was the only crew in which all the marriages survived (astronaut careers were notoriously hard on marriages) it didn’t surprise me. In a singularly beautiful story, it seemed only fitting that the first men to leave Earth considered home to be the most important place in the universe.”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger.
It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across the streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept.
It read:
THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“In the summer of 1949, Borman was one of a select few cadets to tour postwar Germany. For him, the biggest impression came at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau...The trip sickened and saddened him, and it reinforced his certainty that America was a force for good in the world, a country that stepped up to help suffering people and defend freedom.”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“Early on December 25, Houston time, Lovell missed a step. He meant to enter Program 23 and then select Star 01. Instead, he entered Program 01 into his computer. An alarm rang out. Suddenly, Apollo 8’s guidance system reset itself, losing all memory of how the ship was oriented in space. As a result of Lovell’s mistake, the guidance system now believed Apollo 8 to be back on the launchpad at Cape Kennedy.”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson was”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon