aerospace-engineers

"I believe in future generations; I believe in education, in the elimination of all that is worthless in our culture. We must leave only the good things. I don't need to explain this in detail. Every Brazilian knows which way of thinking and which negative attitudes comprise the root of the behavior that prevents our progress, with order, in a more accelerated rhythm."

"What someone says or writes about me doesn't change the way I am; it only changes my opinion about that person."

"People are the most important things in this life. Treat them as something precious because that is exactly what they are. Just like our beautiful Planet, we are all insignificant compared to the vastness of the Universe. We are all essentially equal. We are not alone and isolated: when you hurt someone, you hurt yourself; when you help someone, you help yourself."

"Godspeed, John Glenn."

"I volunteered for a number of reasons. One of these, quite frankly, was that I thought this was a chance for immortality. Pioneering in space was something I would willingly give my life for."

"Being on the moon had a profound spiritual impact upon my life. Before I entered space with the Apollo 15 mission in July of 1971, I was a lukewarm Christian, to say the least! I was even a silent Christian, but I feel the Lord sent me to the moon so I could return to the earth and share his Son, Jesus Christ. The entire space achievement is put in proper perspective when one realizes that God walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon. I believe that God walked on the earth 2,000 years ago in the person of Jesus Christ. I have totally yielded my life to the Lord’s service to tell people everywhere about the life-changing message of Christ."

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

"The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God."

"I was not able to fight my way through, as they were both involved in it. I told Modi what the CBI had found [that the charges were false], and what the Supreme Court's ruling was [not guilty on all counts]. The CBI had asked the state government to take action against the police officers [responsible for malicious allegations], but they sat on it without divulging what they were doing about it. When the Kerala government wanted to go ahead with the case even after that, the court quashed it with heavy strictures. I also told him about the compensation that I have demanded from the state and Union governments."

"I was not an admirer of Modi. But after meeting him, I have developed an admiration for him because I felt, 'Here's a person who is concerned about a matter of national importance.'"

"I came out of the room full of admiration for Modi. Somebody from the media asked me later, 'Why did you meet a chief minister from Gujarat?' I asked him, 'Why not? Kerala has had five chief ministers—K. Karunakaran, A. K. Antony, E. K. Nayanar, V. Achuthanadan[,] and Oommen Chandy—since the case broke out, but not even one chief minister had the courtesy to talk to me.' But somebody from Gujarat showed an interest in meeting me and hearing my story. I felt great about it. If he had any political motive in meeting me, he would have done so in the public glare. But instead, he met me quietly at 9:30 pm, and he issued no press statement about the meeting."

"Surprisingly, when I met Modi, he did not utter a single word about [R. B.] Sreekumar. He asked me why my case is getting prolonged for so long. He said, "I understand that it has been more than 19 years." I told him that it was because of the games played by various political parties that it was still going on. I told him that it was a false case foisted by both the coalition fronts (the Left Democratic Front and the United Democratic Front) in Kerala, as was established by the CBI. Neither coalition wanted to admit the error in their judgment, as it was a matter of prestige for both."

"The purpose of "Engineering Cybernetics" is then to study those parts of the broad science of cybernetics which have direct engineering applications in designing controlled or guided systems. It certainly includes such topics usually treated in books on servomechanisms. But a wider range of topics is only one difference between engineering cybernetics and servomechanisms engineering. A deeper - and thus more important - difference lies in the fact that engineering cybernetics is an engineering science, while servomechanisms engineering is an engineering practice."

"Qian Xuesen... didn't like being called the father of China's guided-missile program: he felt that the title didn't give credit to his fellow researchers. Indeed, while the Chinese-born, U.S.-educated rocket scientist was technically brilliant, he also realized that legions of bright thinkers can do far more than one genius ever could."

"In 1948, the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener gave a widely read, albeit completely nonmathematical, account of cybernetics. A more mathematical treatment of the elements of engineering cybernetics was presented by H.S. Tsien in 1954, driven by problems related to control of missiles. Together, these works and others of that time form much of the intellectual basis for modern work in robotics and control."

"The celebrated physicist and mathematician A.M. Ampere coined the word cybernetique to mean the science of civil government (Part II of "Essai sur la philosophic des sciences", 1845, Paris). Ampere's grandiose scheme of political sciences has not, and perhaps never will, come to fruition. In the meantime, conflict between governments with the use of force greatly accelerated the development of another branch of science, the science of control and guidance of mechanical and electrical systems. It is thus perhaps ironical that Ampere's word should be borrowed by N. Wiener to name this new science, so important to modern warfare. The "cybernetics" of Wiener ("Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the animal and the Machine," John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1948) is the science of organization of mechanical and electrical components for stability and purposeful actions. A distinguishing feature of this new science is the total absence of considerations of energy, heat, and efficiency, which are so important in other natural sciences. In fact, the primary concern of cybernetics is on the qualitative aspects of the interrelations among the various components of a system and the synthetic behavior of the complete mechanism."

"I do not plan to come back. I have no reason to come back.. I plan to do my best to help the Chinese people build up the nation to where they can live with dignity and happiness."

"That the government permitted this genius, this scientific genius, to be sent to Communist China to pick his brains is one of the tragedies of this century."

"It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go."

"An engineering science aims to organize the design principles used in engineering practice into a discipline and thus to exhibit the similarities between different areas of engineering practice and to emphasize the power of fundamental concepts. In short, an engineering science is predominated by theoretical analysis and very often uses the tool of advanced mathematics."

"It's the saddest moment of my life."

"It is important to plan for maximum utilization of contingent capability."

"For the most part, these are not new lessons, but lessons learned in different circumstances and surroundings. The fact that they are not new is of course a lesson in itself — we must continually strive to benefit from past experiences and structure our management so that past related experience can be brought to bear on current problems."

"Another lesson comes to mind and that is the need for continued hard review of design requirements. In retrospect, the requirement that led to the provision of a meteoroid shield was questionable. The shield was required in order to meet the arbitrary numerical design goal with the limited environmental knowledge then existing. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, however, the shield was not necessary."

"If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, he would have given man a moon."

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

"Humanity faces the most complex task of its history so far. Stated in a solution-oriented way, it is necessary gradually to reorganize this planet at two levels. One must deal with the competing necessities of biosphere and mankind with all their environmental and climatic consequences. On the other level, it is necessary to resolve the demands of competing nations and worlds within mankind's hierarchy of socioeconomic developmental levels and the "Christmas tree" of sociopolitical, ideological, and military consequences."

"If you want to move mountains, you just go move mountains. If you don't have a big enough shovel, you get some friends to help you. If you have the enthusiasm to charge ahead, you can do all sorts of things. Some things you can't do. You can't invent a perpetual motion machine. You've got to select your targets. But people can do so much more than they realize."

"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."

"Success did not thrill him in the least. He regarded a success merely as a convenient platform from which to plan a further advance."

"Whatever the little man showed him or explained, the designer did nothing but grunt. This was one of his more offensive techniques; he would stand in silence listening to a halting explanation and then grunt, a grunt expressing an ill-tempered scepticism or plain disbelief."

"If you're going to make your life in a new country you should go before you're twenty-five. After that you start to get associations, little grooves and anchors, that make it difficult to change."

"You can't go through life sitting on the fence. You've got to make decisions, and sometimes you're pretty sure to make them wrong."

"A wiser man than I once said that an unusual man is apt to look unusual. In my department we seek for original thinkers, for the untiring brain that pursues its object by day and by night. If the untiring brain refuses to leave its quest to attend to such matters as the neat arrangement of collar and tie or to removing food stains from its waistcoat, I do not greatly complain."

"They sat by the lake for a couple of hours, talking, finding out about each other."

"She said, "When you've seen all the new places you've got no more new places to see. And anyway, one new place is just like another new place. . . . I used to like meeting new people every trip - and I still do. But those things, meeting new people, seeing new places, they aren't everything. And while you go on in that sort of life you can't have any real friends or any real home. Because you're never there . . .""

"She recognised in Mr Honey a man of moods, capable of deep depression; all geniuses, she had read, were men like that."

"Personal unpleasantness always upset his work; he could not think clearly if his mind was full of hard things that had been said about him, and he liked thinking clearly. Rows frightened him; he would go to considerable lengths to avoid them."

"For many years the actress had been out of touch with the hard realities of life. All her working life had been spent in the facile world of honky-tonk, of synthetic emotion and of phoney glamour. Now she was getting a glimpse into a new world, a world of hard, stark facts, a world in which things had to be exactly right or people would be killed. She was beginning to perceive that little insignificant men like Mr Honey were the brains behind that world."

"Airline stewardesses are not chosen for their repellent qualities, and Miss Corder was a very charming girl."

"His agitation was subsiding; already he was becoming aware that he had not got it in him to make these men believe that what he said was true. He had had so much of this in the past; he was accustomed to being right and being disbelieved on vital issues. It was what happened to him; other people could put across their convictions and win credence, but he had never been able to do that. Now it was happening again."

"Environment has its effect on everybody, and for a time it had a numbing effect on him, preventing him from thinking clearly."

"People believe what they want to believe."

"It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers."

"Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes — not yet, anyhow."

"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."

"All good designers are difficult men or they could not be good designers; I think everybody at the table was more or less aware of that. We set ourselves to mollify the great man, and I say that with sincerity. A great man he was, a great designer, and a superlative engineer. But not an easy man to deal with. No."

"He was a dark-haired, fresh-faced boy of twenty-one or twenty-two, who adopted the pose that everything was a joke and nothing really mattered."

"He was like a little boy let loose in a toy shop, uncertain which of the attractive treasures to pick up first."

"She did not understand what all that meant, but it was evidently something very near his heart, and so she said, "How splendid!""