On Sunday August 5, 2012, I was among a group of people who witnessed the Rover landing on Mars in real time at NASA's Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Ahmed Zewail
I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.
Alain de Botton
I flew fighters for the Navy in San Diego for three years, went and did my post-graduate education, and then I was a test pilot in Patuxent River, Maryland, for a few years. I was back in the fleet in the Navy when I was selected to come back here to NASA to become an astronaut.
Alan G. Poindexter
Since I am me, I find it very difficult to judge how fascinating listening to my nasal, heavily-accented drone for two hours would be to somebody who wasn't me.
Alan Moore
There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.
Alan Stern
As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that's no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem or failing to champion reform.
The costs of badly-run NASA projects are paid for with cutbacks or delays in NASA projects that didn't go over budget. Hence the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished.
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No - actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.
It is only by freeing NASA from routine human transport to low-Earth orbit that we can afford to once again see American astronauts exploring distant worlds.
In high school, I was selected for NASA's Math & Science program. I'd hop on the yellow school bus and head up to Cape Canaveral.
Allison Schroeder
They used to time our elementary fire drills so we could watch the launches. I thought that was normal. I thought every kid watched every NASA launch.
You think NASA is going to be cutting edge, but they've got so many buildings that are just left over from the '60s. It's old.
I interned at NASA for five years, and I grew up in Cape Canaveral, and my grandfather was an engineer on the Mercury capsule, and my grandmother was a software engineer. I literally grew up playing on the Mercury capsule prototypes.
We have a great NASA support team that uplinks the nightly news. And if we have favorite TV shows or movies or sporting events, they can uplink those too. We also have access to the Internet just like we would on the ground. We have email. And we video-conference with our families about once a week. We feel pretty connected up here.
Anne McClain
Fifty years after humans landed on the moon for the first time, America has driven a golden spike on the trail to new space exploration feats through the work of our commercial partner SpaceX and all of the dedicated and talented flight controllers at NASA and our international partners.
The folks at NASA really look at the world and try to envision how things can be better.
Yes, everybody has bullied me. They kept saying I was nasal and what not.
Atif Aslam
A lot of missions for NASA or experiments on accelerators happen through a whole process of scientific retreats, long-range planning, forming collaborations to do studies - all this kind of stuff. It's very democratic.
Barry Barish
The head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.
Bill Nelson
NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world's premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget.
If NASA is to reach beyond the Moon and someday reach Mars, it must be relieved of the burden of launching people and cargo to low earth orbit. To do that, we must invest more in commercial spaceflight.
The hazards posed by Near-Earth Asteroids are assessed by Sentry, a computer system developed by the Near-Earth Objects Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The software factors together a cosmic rock's coordinates, distance, velocity, and gravitational influences to calculate its trajectory.
The scientific consensus is that climate change is real, urgent, and caused by humans. This science should be both supported and understood by anyone who hopes to lead NASA, one of our nation's top science agencies.
Congressman Bridenstine's legislative record and his own testimony during his nomination hearing show that he rejects NASA's role in earth science, adopts industry perspectives without critical analysis, and embraces extreme and divisive social views. NASA deserves better.
NSS has strongly supported competition in both the NASA Commercial Re-supply Services program and the Commercial Crew program.
NASA is a big organization with a lot of needs that have to be met. So there are a lot of opportunities.
By 1973, we had a space station, the Skylab, and we had multiple probes going up to planets. So, all this wonderful stuff happened in 10 to 15 years. About that time, there should have been enormous initiatives to make it affordable for people to fly in space, not just a handful of trained NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts.
NASA works for the White House. There are many at NASA that wish they were building a modern replacement for the Shuttle. However, they had marching orders to instead work on other things, some of which should have no place in a research organization.
NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.
A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.
With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.
I'm urging NASA to foster the development of what I call 'runway landers.' No, that's not the name of a high stakes gambler from Vegas. It's a type of spacecraft that flies to orbit like the retiring Shuttles but then glides to a landing like an airplane on a runway. Just like the Shuttles do.
The way I see it, commercial interests should manage a lunar base while NASA gets on with the really important task of flying to Mars.
NASA's been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve, and it's sad that we are turning the program in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation it provides to young people.
I am not sure about Bill Nelson. I haven't heard him say, 'Let's junk the NASA plan to send humans to the moon.' He's not about to say that. That would not be very popular.
NASA needs to focus on the things that are really important and that we do not know how to do. The agency is a pioneering force, and that is where its competitive advantage lies.
There's no proof of the Earth's curvature and this fake space agency Nasa use CGI images and every one is different.
Cassini was an international undertaking, led by NASA and the European Space Agency and designed to be, in every dimension, a dramatic advance over Voyager. At the size of a school bus, it was bigger than Voyager and outfitted with the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever carried into the outer solar system.
It has only been within my lifetime that asteroids have been considered a credible threat to our planet. And since then, there's been a focused effort underway to discover and catalog these objects. I am lucky enough to be part of this effort. I'm part of a team of scientists that use NASA's NEOWISE telescope.
NASA has hit a comet with an impactor, during the Deep Impact mission. The goal of that mission was to study the surface by making a crater and stirring up the surface material so it could be studied.
Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.
Nothing focuses your mind quite like flying a jet. That's one reason NASA requires that astronauts fly T-38s: it forces us to concentrate and prioritize in some of the same ways we need to in a rocket ship.
NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.
In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.
The secret life of women is to men what the universe is to NASA - unimaginably infinite and completely undiscoverable.
For NASA, space is still a high priority.
I understand that NASA reported that there's new evidence of water on Mars. I'm here to report that we still don't have any evidence of affordable gasoline in Michigan.
NASA, and all the other spacefaring nations of the world, have agreed to a set of 'planetary-protection' principles, aimed at preventing the accidental contamination of another habitable world with organisms from Earth.
I do a lot of work with NASA and am involved in research projects studying planetary evolution, Earth-like planets, and potential conditions for life elsewhere.
