I don't care what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do.

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily.

To recognize that the greatest error is not to have tried and failed, but that in trying, we did not give it our best effort

Failure is not an option!

You can not operate in this room unless you believe that you are Superman, and whatever happens, you're capable of solving the problem.

We had risen to probably one of the greatest challenges in history, put a man on the moon in the decade. We'd created incredible technologies. But what was most important, we'd created the teams, what I call the human factor. People who were energized by a mission.

I don't care what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do.