It was a texture. The blackness was so intense.
— Charles Duke, Astronaut, Apollo 16
Teach me your mood,
O patient stars.
Who climb each night,
the ancient sky.
leaving on space no shade, no scars,
no trace of age, no fear to die.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from The Poet
You keep returning to the thought that only very thin walls separate you from the deathly cold and incomprehensible emptiness of space.
— Oleg Makarov, cosmonaut, Life magazine, November 1988
The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, or falling from a height.
— Carl Sagan
As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startlingly aware how artificial are thousands of boundaries we’ve created to separate and define.
— Russell ‘Rusty’ Schweikart, returning from Apollo 9
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