Jim Lovell

Astronaut

1928-03-25

Quotes by Jim Lovell

• The fascination to go into space has existed for hundreds of years. But as we do things and they're successful, people get bored.

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• I was a naval officer and aviator. I tested airplanes and got selected to be an astronaut later on.

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• Be thankful for problems. If they were less difficult, someone with less ability might have your job.

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• I could put my thumb up to a window and completely hide the Earth. I thought, 'Everything I've ever known is behind my thumb.'

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• We didn't slow down, unlike the others, when we got to the moon because we needed its gravity to get back, so we hold the altitude record. I never even thought about it. Records are only made to be broken.

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• My view is that we should go back to the moon, build up the infrastructure to make flights there commonplace - be comfortable with it - then use that infrastructure to expand and go to Mars.

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• Mars is a long ways away. The moon is only 240,000 miles, but Mars is in the millions. It's too risky without spending more time going to the moon.

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• The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.

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• We got to the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of a poor year for this country. We had Vietnam. We had civil unrest. We had the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But we went around the moon and saw the far side for the first time. A script writer couldn't have done a better job of raising people's hope.

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• From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

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• There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.

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