"Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!"
— Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space
"On the periscope… what a beautiful view! Cloud cover over Florida, three-to-four tenths near the eastern coast, obscures up through Hatteras… I can see Okeechobee, identify Andros Island… identify the reefs…"
— Alan Shepard, the first American in space
"When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change… it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man."
— Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, lunar module pilot for Apollo 9 (first test of the Lunar Module in low Earth orbit)
"Charlie, this is — it's… it's so hard to describe, you can go right up past Alaska, and you can see the polar cap… it's incredible."
"We see it all here, Gene. Its colors are really beautiful."
"That's great. And the blackest black that you ever could conceive is the setting for all this."
"We see it all here, Gene. Its colors are really beautiful."
"That's great. And the blackest black that you ever could conceive is the setting for all this."
— Conversation between lunar module pilot Gene Cernan and CAPCOM Charles Duke during the Apollo 10 mission
"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."
— Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, looking at the Earth during Apollo 11
"The thing that really surprised me was that it [Earth] projected an air of fragility. And why, I don't know. I don't know to this day. I had a feeling it's tiny, it's shiny, it's beautiful, it's home, and it's fragile."
— Michael Collins, the command module pilot of Apollo 11
"Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvellous and mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway."
— Lewis Thomas
"I've been around the world 2,650 times or so, and… I never once could see enough of it. During my first space walk, while I was outside in the dark, we actually were far enough south that we went through the earth's aurora. It is so fantastically beautiful and such a raw artistic human experience… to look at the northern lights is like magic. To be in them, to surf on them, that's beyond magic. It's surreal. My last orbit of the world was even more rich and magnificent and awe-inspiring than all of the ones before it. The unheralded beauty of our planet and of where it sits and the environment that we're in is so constantly magnificent that when you're looking at it, you talk in hushed tones. Like you've walked into a giant forest or the most beautiful cathedral on earth. You don't talk in a big brassy voice there. You're reverential of where you are."
— Canadian astronaut and Space Shuttle and ISS veteran Chris Hadfield
