Orbit Quotes

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

Then if your movie clicks with real audiences, you`ll be sucked into some sort of Hollywood orbit. It`s a devil of a place where the only religion that really counts is box office.

De-orbit is not perfectly risk-free, but the vehicle is in pristine condition. It`s all downhill from a certain perspective.

De-orbit is not perfectly risk-free, but the vehicle is in pristine condition. Our big risk now, aside from the inherent risk of de-orbiting through a fireball, would be weather.

De-orbit is not a risk-free activity. We will be pretty darned happy to get to wheelstop and see this good crew step off Discovery.

During de-orbit, I`m sure I`ll have a thought or two about Rick Husband and his crew. At wheel stop, I`m sure all of us are going to think a lot about the 107 crew.

(He`d better be, because the new space race already is under way and competition is shaping up as fierce. Rutan`s chief rival may ultimately be Elon Musk. A former Internet mogul who in 2002 sold his online payment company, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, Musk now runs SpaceX in El Segundo, Calif., which is developing an orbital space vehicle. Musk notes that making it into orbit requires going eight times faster and producing 65 times more rocket energy than a suborbital vehicle like SpaceShipOne. Musk has already put more than $50 million into SpaceX and says he is prepared to invest $50 million more. He expects it to take at least five years to get passengers into orbit. In the meantime, SpaceX is generating revenue by booking orders to launch satellites; its first such launch is scheduled for January.) Our earned revenue will be $35 million after a little more than two years of operation, ... By comparison, the X-Prize was a one-off of $10 million, and it took Burt something like five years to do it.

(What Space X ultimately contributes to space travel might please the government in other ways.) One of the significant innovations of Falcon V is that because it`s got five engines on the main stage, it can actually lose an engine and reach orbit safely, ... If the space shuttle were to lose one of its solid rocket boosters the people on the shuttle would be doomed.

The first satellites go into orbit around Mars in 2008, as many as a half dozen of them,

I don`t go along with going to Moon first to build a launch pad to go to Mars. We should go to Mars from Earth orbit. We have already been to the Moon; we`ve already practiced.

NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.

Things are going very smoothly. As expected, there are some minor glitches, and the eight minutes that it took us to get to orbit, we trained months and months for, and didn`t have to use any of that preparation, other than being aware and ready.

We`re doing a multitude of different scientific experiments on orbit on things that are only possible to be done in the space environment.

NASA wanted to assure its ability to examine the spacecraft in orbit for signs of damage.

We were only on orbit a little over two days, so we had no adverse effects from being weightless.

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

You`re going very fast when you`re on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half.

For the first time in 3-1/2 decades, the federal government plans to leave low-Earth orbit. That`s a major shift.

There is one service men provide to women everywhere, regardless of race or culture, and that is courting. 3 billion men on earth, all willing to provide this service at anytime, in any place. By the way, men go about their daily business for one purpose... to get the attention of women. Like the guy coming out of his space-ship, he`s been in orbit for 3 weeks; first woman he sees he`ll be like, `So, did you see me up there?`

This has been my fourth flight and by far it`s been the busiest flight I`ve ever been on. There are thousands of people on the ground who made this mission successful. The real tribute goes to those folks on the ground who`ve helped us to be really successful on orbit.