Gene Cernan Quotes

Curiosity is the essence of human existence and exploration has been part of humankind for a long time. The exploration of space, like the exploration of life, if you will, is a risk. We’ve got to be willing to take it.

I’ve been asked about UFOs and I’ve said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization.

I was a child of World War Two . I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.

If the guidance failed or started to stray or went somewhere we didn’t like or the ground didn’t like, I could flip a switch, and I could control seven, over seven and a half million pounds of thrust with this handle and fly the thing to the Moon myself.

OK, let’s get this mother out of here.

Chemical propulsion is obsolete to go anywhere other than the moon. Three days – that’s acceptable. But for Mars, we need propulsion technologies to get us there in, say, 60 days – then spend whatever length of time we want to spend and return when we want to come home.

I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership in the world, to explore, to seek knowledge.

We don’t have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.

One of the most important things about the geology on the moon is your descriptions of what you see, comparing them to things that you’ve seen on Earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground would know what you’re talking about; and then take pictures of them.

Get the shuttle out of the garage. It’s in its prime of its life. How could we just put it away?

Prepare for the unknown, unexpected and inconceivable . . . after 50 years of flying I’m still learning every time I fly.

To become an astronaut, someone has to have a dream of his own to do something that he or she has always wanted to do, then commit himself to making that dream come true.