Top 44 Quotes by Henry Spencer

It's true that Apollo 10's lander was overweight. Late in the craft's development, it became clear that its ballooning weight was endangering the whole mission.

Rocket engines generally are simpler than jet engines, not more complicated.

Liquid oxygen is one of the cheapest manufactured substances on Earth. In large quantities, it costs pennies per kilogram - cheaper than milk or beer.

Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts.

Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane.

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

The key virtue of orbital assembly is that it eliminates the tight connection between the size of the expedition and the size of the rockets used to launch it.

Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.

In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.

Technically and financially, it might still make sense to give up on Ares I and simply write off the money spent on it, but politically, that's probably impossible.