Blunden Shuttle Quotes

Every shuttle mission's been successful. ~ Christa McAuliffe

The shuttle is the worst $20 you'll ever save. It adds 90 minutes to whatever a Town Car or cab would have been. You have the unenviable choice between being dropped off last or being dropped off first and having a bunch of losers who can't afford cab fare and have no friends or loved ones with cars knowing exactly where you live. ~ Adam Carolla

The future doesn't belong to the light-hearted. It belongs to the brave. ~ Ronald Reagan

Our shuttle crew is four people, because we're going to transfer a crew up to station, so all the jobs are divided between four people rather than five or six people. So it's been busy. ~ Linda M. Godwin

I will go around the space shuttle and give a guided tour of the major areas and describe what is done in each area. This will be called The Ultimate Field Trip. ~ Christa McAuliffe

No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents. ~ Sally Ride

When I received my glossy black invitation in the mail a few days later, I could feel my heart swell with excitement. "Hef's Midsummer Night's Dream Party," it read. On the front was a beautiful pinup illustration by famed artist Olivia De Berardinis and inside was a small piece of paper with directions. It was like Cinderella finally scoring an invitation to the ball - except instead of arriving by horse-drawn carriage, we would board a shuttle at a UCLA parking garage. ~ Holly Madison

At that point, there will be the handover between the shuttle arm and the station arm so that the shuttle arm will take the cradle and put it into the cargo bay. ~ Umberto Guidoni

I think the Space Shuttle is worth one billion dollars a launch. I think that it is worth two billion dollars for what it does. I think the Shuttle is worth it for the work it does. ~ Pete Conrad

When you look at the Earth from the vantage point of space, our planet looks like a little blue marble. Seeing our world from that vantage point cognitively changes you. My orbital shift happened after breaking bread with my space station crewmates and my shuttle crewmates. it showed me how close we are as countries, as races, as a species. I marveled that on Earth we have all these distances and separations and geographic boundaries, but they vanish quickly in the weightless interior of the space station. ~ Leland Melvin

Well," Marwick said. "It's good to recall that wherever people start, whatever they bring with them, humanity can still pull together in heavy weather." Havelock shrugged. Koenen's voice was still fresh in his memory, and Williams drifting flatlined and dead. Naomi Nagata in her cell. The Belter engineer whose locker people had been pissing in. The shuttle he'd rigged as a weapon. Jesus, he felt bad enough about Williams. He could barely imagine what it would have been like if he'd deployed the weaponized shuttle. "Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. These people could just as easily have gone down with their teeth in each other's throats. That happens too. It's just the folks that go that way aren't around to write the history books." "Amen, ~ James S.A. Corey

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle. ~ Sally Ride

Taking a shuttle or even paying for a taxi to a rental office that's a few miles away from the airport can mean a lower rate - 50 percent lower is common - for the same car, from the same company, for the same length of time. Many companies run free shuttles from some of the major airports. ~ Jean Chatzky

I think both the space shuttle program and the International Space Station program have not really lived up to their expectations. ~ Buzz Aldrin

The vast majority of the shuttle program was a success. We learned so much about how a reusable spacecraft interacts with its environment, how it ages-and what to design next time. ~ Eileen Collins

Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle. ~ Sally Ride

Even with only two people on board, where maintenance is a large piece of our working day, we still have time to do scientific research. We have to be ready to support those Shuttle visits in a lot of different ways. ~ John L. Phillips

Cricket to us was more than play,
It was a worship in the summer sun. ~ Edmund Blunden

We have played a critical role in meeting the new safety standards. The Canadian space industry contributed new tools that make the inspection of the space shuttle possible. ~ Marc Garneau

The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing's inside and can you guess his shape? Where he's kept or what's the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a time warp, a carder of souls from the world's nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his dead cart through the streets and does he call his trade to each? Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just such wise that he's invited in ~ Cormac McCarthy

I'm no poet. I'm a soldier. So, I'll just tell you the way it is, as clumsy as it sounds. When I first saw you, it was like being thrown from a shuttle before it touched the ground. I fell and when I landed, I felt it in every cell of my body. You disturbed me. You took away my inner peace. You left me drifting. I wanted you right there. Them as I learned more of you, I wanted you even more. You want me too. I've seen it in your eyes. You taught me the meaning of loneliness, because when I don't see you, I feel alone. You may reject me, you may deny yourself, and if you choose to not accept me, I will abide be your decision. But know that there will never be another one like you for me and one like me for you. We both waited years so we could meet. ~ Ilona Andrews

One downward cut, she saw. One quick, final strike, and she could kill him. The landing lights of a shuttle appeared in the distance, coming over the trees in her direction. She had to make a decision, now. Kill him, a voice inside her head said. It was amorphous, unidentifiable, raw. Pure vengeful emotion. So easy, she told herself. So quick. ~ Alan Dean Foster

The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons - Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire - that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond's Aston Martin. The missile compartment has similarly retro-looking panels of buttons. They provided the setup for one of the more quotable things Murray said to me - a line that, were fewer precautions in place, could have joined "Houston, we've had a problem" or "Watch this" in the pantheon of understated taglines for calamity: "I wouldn't lean on that. ~ Mary Roach

Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

Lila sensed the cessation of motion more than she actually felt it. Being in the shuttle did something to her equilibrium - something about the sense of being high in the air in what looked like a bubble from the inside combined with a force that felt like an invisible seat belt. Her fear was making everything worse. ~ Sean Platt

Did you get me that movie about Genghis Khan?
'It's in the Netflix queue, but that's not the surprise. You don't need to worry, it'll be something good. I just don't want you to feel depressed about going home.'
Oh, I won't. But it would be cool to have a stream like this in the backyard. Can you make one?
'Ummm... no.'
I figured. Can't blame a hound for trying.
Oberon was indeed surprised when we got back home to Tempe. Hal had made the arrangements for me and Oberon perked up as soon as we were dropped off by the shuttle from the car rental company.
'Hey, smells like someone's in my territory,' he said.
'Nobody could be here without my permission, you know that.'
'Flidais did it.'
'That isn't Flidais you smell, believe me.'
I opened the front door, and Oberon immediately ran to the kitchen window that gazed upon the backyard. He barked joyously when he saw what was waiting for him there.
'French poodles! All black and curly with poofy little tails!'
'And every one of them in heat.'
'Oh, WOW! Thanks Atticus! I can't wait to sniff their asses!'
He bounded over to the door and pawed at it because the doggie door was closed to prevent the poodles from entering.
'You earned it, buddy. Hold on, get down off the door so I can open it for you, and be careful, don't hurt any of them.'
I opened the door, expecting him to bolt through it and dive into his own personal canine harem, but instead he took one ~ Kevin Hearne

The Shuttle was retired in 2011, after 30 years in service, and today the Soyuz, a much smaller vehicle, is the only way for human beings to get to the ISS. Some astronauts hired during the Shuttle era are simply too tall to fly in the tiny Soyuz. The possibility that they'll leave Earth is currently zero. ~ Chris Hadfield

I wanted to get superimposed on a shuttle launch. ~ Mark Roberts

Two subsequent incidents of import established CNN: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, which CNN was the only network to cover as it happened, and the 1991 Gulf War, which CNN chronicled round the clock from a proximity as irresistible as it was alarming, bomb blasts and gunfire lighting up TV screens from coast to coast. ~ Steve Erickson

Avoid the traffic by using one of the park's shuttle buses and view the elk rut with a park ranger. ~ Dave Barry

Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision. ~ Edmund Blunden

Tangled onto the shuttle, we were being woven back and forth to create the same tapestry of despair and heartbreak and loss. It was so much
bigger than I could see before, and all I had done was stand at the centre of the web and feed it my anger and frustration and jealousy. ~ J.A. Ironside

The launch of a space shuttle can still make you weep with amazement and wonder, if you happen to be watching it. ~ Hanna Rosin

My job during the EVAs, the spacewalks, is to act as the inside coordinator. I remain on the aft flight deck of the shuttle, and I act in a manner to help the gentlemen outside, my fellow crewmates, who are performing the EVA tasks. ~ Alan G. Poindexter

Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott ... who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web - to ply an industrious shuttle - to make - something - to close the Shutters and the Peephole too - ~ A.S. Byatt

One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of - and hence be able to control - the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker. ~ C. Wright Mills

Think about it, Lee - we already know that intelligent minds produce finely tuned devices. Look at the space shuttle. Look at a television set. Look at an internal combustion engine. We see minds producing complex, precision machinery all the time.

So the existence of a supermind - or God - as the explanation for the fine - tuning of the universe makes all sense in the world. ~ Lee Strobel

It's very sad that there's going to be a hiatus in manned space flight from the U.S. The Shuttle was a fantastic, hugely complex vehicle. It was inevitable it would come to an end, but this is the opportunity for the commercial world to get involved. As the Shuttle era ends, another window of opportunity opens. ~ David Mackay

Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station. ~ Martin Rees