Thoughts from the astronauts

See the link below for more quotes, and for beautiful pictures from space.

http://andrewcatsaras.blogspot.com/2013/03/look-up-at-stars-not-down-at-your-feet.html


Scott Carpenter Mercury 7: "The planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and must be cared for. It's lonely. It's small. It's isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion our own hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is home, and this is all we've got."


Frank Borman Apollo 8: "When you are finally up on the Moon looking back on Earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you're going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?"

"I think the one overwhelming emotion we had when we saw the Earth rising in the distance over the lunar landscape.....It makes us realise that we all do exist on one small globe. For from 230,000 miles away it really is a small planet."


Michael Collins Apollo 11: "How peaceful and calm and quiet and serene it looked, and how fragile it appeared. That was, oddly enough, the overriding sensation I got looking at the Earth was, my God, that little thing is so fragile out there."

"After the flight of Apollo 11, the three of us [Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins] went on an around the world trip. Wherever we went people, instead of saying 'You Americans did it', everywhere they said 'We did it! We humankind. We the human race. We people" I'd never heard people in different countries use this word 'we, we, we' as emphatically as we were hearing from Europeans, Asians, Africans, where ever we went it was 'We finally did it!' I thought that was a wonderful thing."


Edgar Mitchell Apollo 14: "When you see the Earth like that it's powerful. Not any bigger than that [thumb size] way up there. You get to see the Earth receding and you get to see the Moon coming towards you and it's awe inspiring"

"The biggest joy was on the way home in my cockpit window every two minutes, the Earth, the Moon and the Sun, and the whole 360 degree panorama of the heavens and that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realised that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, and the molecules in the bodies of my partners were prototyped, were manufactured, in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness, it was not 'them and us' it was 'that's me' 'that's us'. It was accompanied by an ecstasy, an epiphany, an insight, a sense of 'Oh my God! Yes!'"

"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. From there out on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles and say 'Look at that, you son of a bitch!'"