1
Sare Jahan se Accha ( Better than the entire world)
Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian cosmonaut, employed the first line of the song in 1984 to describe to then prime minister Indira Gandhi how India appeared from outer space.
2
“I’m coming back in… and it’s the saddest moment of my life.”
Ed White expresses his sorrow at the conclusion of the first American spacewalk during the Gemini 4 mission on 3 June 1965.
3
”When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon, I cried.”
Alan Shepard talking about his time on the lunar surface during the Apollo 14 mission in February 1971.
4
”I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
Neil Armstrong on looking back at the Earth from the Moon in July 1969.
5
“I feel fine. How about you?”
Yuri Gagarin shows how calm he was during the first manned space mission on 12 April 1961 in his response to ground control when asked how he was doing.
6
“There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”
Carl Sagan in Time magazine, 9 January 1995, describing the Pale Blue Dot image of Earth (above), taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft 6 billion kilometres away in 1990.
7
”The scenery was very beautiful. But I did not see The Great Wall [of China].”
Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut (taikonaut), speaking in October 2003 on his inability to see The Great Wall of China from space, which has often been said to be visible.
8
“From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
Edgar Mitchel, Apollo 14 astronaut, speaking in People magazine on 8 April 1974.
9
“The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search the chance of success is zero.”
Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s paper ‘Searching for Interstellar Communications’ .
Collected by Vikram M R
