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Quote by James Mahaffey

“The Soviets were worried that the Americans would attack their "sparkling new Mir space station, ... in a space shuttle, throw out grappling hooks, forcibly board the peaceful habitat and claim it as captured territory. To the hard-core Soviet mind-set, the American government was an unstable combination of cowboys and gangsters, unpredictable and capable of any insane action. The cosmonauts would have to be armed against outrageous aggression.”

Quote by James Mahaffey

Book:Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder
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Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder

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James Mahaffey

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“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.”

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Book:Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight
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“Discovery first flew in 1984, the third orbiter to join the fleet. It was named for one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook. Space shuttle Discovery is the most-flown orbiter; today will be its thirty-ninth and final launch. By the end of this mission, it will have flown a total of 365 days in space, making it the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Discovery was the first orbiter to carry a Russian cosmonaut and the first to visit the Russian space station Mir. On that flight, in 1995, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft. Discovery flew twelve of the thirty-eight missions to assemble the International Space Station, and it was responsible for deploying the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was perhaps the most far reaching accomplishment of the shuttle program, as Hubble has been called the most important telescope in history and one of the most significant scientific instruments ever invented. It has allowed astronomers to determine the age of the universe, postulate how galaxies form, and confirm the existence of dark energy, among many other discoveries. Astronomers and astrophysicists, when they are asked about the significance of Hubble, will simply say that it has rewritten the astronomy books. In the retirement process, Discovery will be the “vehicle of record,” being kept as intact as possible for future study. Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of Challenger and then again after the loss of Columbia. To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope. ‘Don’t worry,’ Discovery seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad. 'Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth.’ And then she did.”

ScienceSpaceDiscoverySpace ExplorationNasaColumbiaSpace ProgramSpace ShuttleChallengerSpace ProgramsDiscovery Shuttle
Book:Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight
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“We are a part of nature yet we have been given the best job—Gardeners—though we have forgotten to teach the new generations how precious this is. Taking care of the Earth is important because it gives us a better, healthier and longer life here.”

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“Histories of the Kennedy Space Center acknowledge without exaggeration that the obstacle posed by the mosquitoes was so serious that NASA quite literally could not have put a man on the moon by Kennedy's "before the decade is out" deadline without the invention of DDT. In this way, the challenges of spaceflight reveal themselves to be distinctly terrestrial.”

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Book:Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight
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“If someone asked me to sum up what is great about my country, I would probably tell them about Apollo 11, about the four hundred thousand people who worked to make the impossible come true within eight years, about how it changed me to see the space-scarred Columbia capsule in a museum as a child, about how we came in peace for all mankind.”

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“I have written this book with the conviction that the response to injury does not have to be vengeance and that we need to distinguish between revenge and justice. A response other than revenge is possible and desirable. For that to happen, however, we need to turn the moment of injury into a moment of freedom, of choice. For Americans, that means turning 9/11 into an opportunity to reflect on America's place in the world. Grief for victims should not obscure the fact that there is no choice without a debate and no democracy without choice.”

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Book:Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
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