Military Flight Engineer

🇺🇸John D. Carmack

Technology

b. 1970

"It's nice to have a game that sells a million copies."

🇨🇦Neil Armstrong

Education

1932–2020

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

🇺🇸Adam Steltzner

Literature

b. 1963

"Exploring is fundamentally human; we've done it for thousands of years. It's an expression of something that's the best in us."

🇺🇸John McKay

Literature

1922–1975

"We've proven that we can't win on the road or in front of our home crowd."

Otto Lilienthal

Journalism

1848–1896

"The sailing flight of birds is the only form of flight which is carried on for some length of time without the expenditure of power."

🇬🇧Nevil Shute

Technology

1899–1960

"He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars."

🇺🇸Frank Borman

Technology

1928–2023

"There was one more impression we wanted to transmit: our feeling of closeness to the Creator of all things. This was Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968, and I handed Jim and Bill their lines from the Holy Scriptures."

🇺🇸Burt Rutan

Technology

b. 1943

"If you don't have a consensus that it's nonsense, you don't have a breakthrough."

🇭🇺Theodore von Kármán

Mathematics

1881–1963

"Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."

🇺🇸Rusty Schweickart

Business

b. 1935

"What it is you identify with begins to shift. When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognise that your identity is with that whole thing."

🇺🇸Michael Porter

Economics

b. 1947

"The grandfather of concepts for predicting the probable course of industry evolution is the familiar."

"When failure is not an option, success can be expensive."

🇺🇸Wernher von Braun

Technology

1912–1977

"The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet."

🇺🇸Thomas Gold

Science

1920–2004

"A theorist can explain any correlation, and its inverse."

🇺🇸Krafft Arnold Ehricke

Science

1917–1984

"The economic function of space industrialization is to generate jobs on Earth, not in space."

🇺🇸Kalpana Chawla

Technology

1962–2003

"The coolest thing for me is the experience of floating and not feeling my weight. And hanging by a window just after sunset and watching the stars in the big black dome of the sky as the earth moves underneath."

🇮🇳G. Madhavan Nair

Science

b. 1943

"Twenty years from now, when space travel is likely to become mundane like airline travel today, we don't want to be buying travel tickets on other people's space vehicles."

🇺🇸James Irwin

Technology

1930–1991

"I felt the power of God as I'd never felt it before."

🇬🇧John William Dunne

Philosophy

1875–1949

"But the facts are unquestioned. The aeroplane does do these things, and if the theory does not give warranty for the practice, then it is the theory which is wrong."