15 Quotes by James Van Allen

We had an erector set, and I was an avid fan of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines.

I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I’m a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer.

A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now. He’s not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working.

I think we need someone in a responsible political position to have the courage to say, ‘Let’s terminate human spaceflight.’

These days, it’s really been uninteresting except when disasters occur.

I’m one of the most durable and fervent advocates of space exploration, but my take is that we could do it robotically at far less cost and far greater quantity and quality of results.