57 quotes about spacecraft follow in order of popularity. Be sure to bookmark and share your favorites!

This is a significant breakthrough of China's space technology since the successful spaceflight of manned spacecraft Shenzhou-5.

Wang Yongzhi

The engine would be in orbit, producing a beam of photons. The spacecraft would not have to carry that mass along.

William Henry Harrison

Stardust is still very healthy and has fuel left over. After dropping the Space Return Canister, the spacecraft was diverted from entering the Earth's atmosphere and placed in an orbit around the sun that could bring it to another comet in February 2011.

Thanasis Economou

It does cause tension in the family when you have to make choices between having Thanksgiving with your family and going off to solve a problem on the spacecraft.

Jim Erickson

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.

Wernher von Braun

The spacecraft has been programmed to continue even in the event of an emergency. We don't want Cassini to call home if a problem arises, we want it to keep going.

Robert Mitchell

This spacecraft is going to rewrite the science textbooks on Mars.

James Graf

We are at full control of a completely healthy spacecraft.

Howard Eisen

The appearance of the nucleus of this comet was kind of surprising, and different from other comet nuclei that have been recording in spacecraft type detail, so that was quite exciting.

David Jewitt

With this spacecraft, we never had a quiet cruise to Mars. We didn't do just basic maintenance, we conducted major science and engineering calibrations to test how well the instruments were doing in space. These activities help shorten the learning curve for us when we get to Mars and start mapping.

Cindy Schulz

The spacecraft is where it needs to be and going at the right speed and in the right direction.

Omar Baez

In recent decades, spacecraft have passed fairly close to comets and provided us with excellent data. Stardust, however, marks the first time that we have ever collected samples from a comet and brought them back to Earth for study.

Don Brownlee

Trying to dock with a working spacecraft in the operational GEO belt could potentially create debris right there. This would endanger every GEO satellite.

Max Meerman

It's the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It will get to the Moon in nine hours?it will get to Jupiter in one year and nine months.

Colleen Hartman

Even before the peak of the flare, energetic protons were pummeling SOHO as well as geostationary spacecraft around Earth.

Bernhard Fleck

This spacecraft will return more data than all previous Mars missions combined.

James Graf

We would like to have students and other engineers exercise and operate the spacecraft after the biology has been completed for at least some of that time. Of course, if a critical system were to fail or wear out, like the batteries or communications radio, then that's it … since we do not have a lot of redundancy in the design.

Bruce Yost

The spacecraft was designed to settle to a pure simple spin motion around the antenna axis.

Junichiro Kawaguchi

NASA has no plans to develop a space elevator any time soon, but the component technologies have a lot of different applications, ... High-strength materials that are less weight are great for rockets, it's great for airplanes, it's great for spacecraft.

Brant Sponberg

China's development in the field of manned spacecraft has no relation with any 'military threat'.

Hiroyuki Hosoda

It's getting to be a fairly old spacecraft and it's been having a number of issues; none of them are considered life-threatening.

Phil Christensen

We have ignition and liftoff of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on a decade long voyage to visit the planet Pluto and then beyond.

Bruce Buckingham

Of the 13,000 objects, over 40 percent came from breakups of both spacecraft and rocket bodies.

Nicholas Johnson

We have a tremendous amount of anxiety and concern. At the same time, I feel confident. We have a very good spacecraft that has been performing extraordinarily well. We have an excellent well-trained team that's ready to go forward.

Jim Graf

Indeed, the asteroid's orbit is particularly attractive for spacecraft rendezvous, and the extraordinary close encounter in April 2029 provides a unique opportunity to investigate a number of scientific NEO issues.

Mary Cleave

Each time you dip into the atmosphere, you have to be very attentive because if you dip in too far ... it can be detrimental to the spacecraft, ... We have an atmosphere we don't fully understand. ... There are a lot of people who lose a lot of sleep.

Jim Graf

We are totally prepared, both for if everything goes perfectly and if the spacecraft acts up a little bit.

Tom Duxbury

This is a very exciting result. It's the first demonstration that animals can survive a reentry event similar to what would be experienced inside a meteorite. It shows directly that even complex small creatures originating on one planet could survive landing on another without the protection of a spacecraft.

Catharine Conley

This is an engineer's nirvana. Going all the way from concept to building it to getting it into orbit is the high point for a spacecraft engineer.

Steve Jolly

It takes 7 1/2 minutes for a signal to get from Earth to the spacecraft and another 7 1/2 minutes to get back. So, we can't joystick this spacecraft like a video game.

Don Yeomans

The team is trained and confident. The spacecraft systems are healthy and performing as expected, and we're looking forward to adding MRO to the (spacecraft) constellation at Mars.

Bob Berry

It's really come full circle. Right back to Sputnik-size spacecraft.

Stephen Gardner

I think we have much more science to be done by this spacecraft itself, and it will serve an important function as a communications asset [for future missions].

Michael Meyer

There's a certain amount of nervousness at present. ... It's a harsh environment out there and this is not easy. We don't really know what to expect, frankly. ... It could be anything from a crater the size of a football stadium to something that's far more modest. Or the spacecraft could simply bury itself into the comet.

Don Yeomans

Gene Kranz: Let's look at this thing from a... um, from a standpoint of status. What do we got on the spacecraft that's good?

Apollo 13

This was a great dress rehearsal for the Io encounters. We've been wondering how the spacecraft might hold up when it gets close to Io. This latest brush with radiation makes us think that the odds of survival may be fairly good.

Jim Erickson

If the observed reconnections were patchy, one or more spacecraft most likely would not have encountered an accelerated flow of particles. Furthermore, patchy and random reconnection events would have resulted in different spacecraft detecting jets directed in different directions, which was not the case.

Dr. Tai Phan

You know, from the outside, this is a darn impressive spacecraft.

Bill Mcarthur

It's great these images turned out well because a lot of things had to work right, including exactly how the spacecraft points and the stability. It turned out just right.

Alfred Mcewen

This is a very unique vehicle. During the early part of the flight, it acts like a spacecraft. In the middle phase, the HTV reenters the atmosphere like the Space Shuttle, and in the latter stage, it flies like an aircraft. It is an interesting mix of challenges and technologies.

Russ Partch

When we're in Sun, we run on the solar cells and charge the batteries. In eclipse, just the batteries power the spacecraft.

Bruce Yost

We are getting into the dangerous portion of the mission. The cruise has not been easy, but now we are starting to enter into the realm where we have lost two spacecraft in the last 15 years.

James Graf

Clearly I'm going to crash the spacecraft anyway, ... We're trying to do the most useful thing scientifically.

Alan Binder

The spacecraft is just really looking solid.

Robert Mitchell

We have taken the first step but there is at least a decade to go before this technology finds its way onto a spacecraft.

Dr Christopher Semprimoschnig

The air conditioning was off. The flight controllers were sitting there wiping sweat. If they were dealing with any spacecraft issues, which first day out of the box a lot of spacecraft have, you can't concentrate like that.

Alan Stern

The rocky and rough surface of the asteroid was surprising. The 16-minute light travel time [between Earth and the spacecraft] makes real-time communications very difficult.

Donald Yeomans

It's been marching along on its own all weekend long and we aren't going to do anything more to the spacecraft unless, in the very unlikely event that something goes wrong.

Sam Thurman

The five solid rocket boosters are burning just fine, sending the New Horizons spacecraft on its way to the very edge of our solar system.

Bruce Buckingham

You just want to hang there and let the spacecraft gradually adjust the asteroid's course.

Stanley Love

The spacecraft has to be smart enough on its own to observe the comet, determine whether it's headed in the right direction, if not, make its own course correction, and then fire its thrusters to achieve that course correction.

Don Yeomans

Orbit insertion is 'make it or break it' time. You either do it or you don't, and if you don't, you're done. We're making sure that the spacecraft has the best shot of making it into orbit around Mars.

Cindy Schulz

These are materials that are planned for use on future spacecraft. We're getting an opportunity now using the space station as a host to expose these experiments to the space environment and see how they survive and how they perform.

William Kinard

The spacecraft is working well and we are feeling good. All space scientific experiments are carried out as planned.

Nie Haisheng

We still need the shuttle for large station components. They're simply too big to fit on (the Russian) Soyuz or Progress (spacecraft).

Melissa Mathews

As time goes by, and I'm not telling you otherwise, we're less confident. At this point, though, we still have a lot of things we can try and we're doing that ... Everybody has the belief that we can still get a signal from the spacecraft.

Richard Cook

The Apollo 13 accident was caused by an explosion involving liquid oxygen, which is needed along with liquid hydrogen to feed a fuel cell in spacecraft. Use of chemical mixtures, such as ours, for generation of hydrogen and oxygen would eliminate the possibility of such an explosion.

Evgeny Shafirovich