Jim Lovell

“In space-flight terms, six landings on the moon back in the Sixties and Seventies doesn't mean much.”

“Boys like either dinosaurs or airplanes. I was very much an airplane boy.”

“People say, 'Did you violate Heaven?' Well, God is down here, too. If you believe in God, you believe in God here as well as 240,000 miles away.”

“For some time, I thought Apollo 13 was a failure. I was disappointed I didn't get to land on the moon. But actually, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I would suspect strongly that over a period of time, if we put our mind to going to Mars, it will be a consortium of several countries.”

“I was born a year after Lindbergh made his historic trip across the Atlantic.”

“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.”

“I take the NASA physical every year.”

“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.”

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

“I was only a hero by default. The flights were few and far between. There weren't that many astronauts. The moon flights were so interesting and exciting.”

“The moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand.”

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

“Houston, we've had a problem.”

“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.”

“After six successful Apollo flights, including two lunar landings, people were getting bored.”

“I didn't go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.”