Top 44 Quotes by Henry Spencer

If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better.

As plans for the first lunar landing started to be made, nobody had really thought about who would be out first.

Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time.

The original specifications for Apollo navigation called for the ability to fly a complete mission, including a lunar landing, with no help from Earth - none, not even voice communications.

Since SpaceX's very beginnings, they have talked about recovering and reusing at least the first stages of their rockets.

My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research.

In the long run, it's impossible to make progress without sometimes having setbacks, although people who get lucky on their first attempt sometimes forget this.

Is manned space exploration important? Yes - not least because it simply works much better than sending robots.

Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent.

NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length.