Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Crippen

A lot of space history lives in that offhand shrug: you train for a mission, history changes the funding line, and you get folded into a different future. Crippen’s phrasing is almost comically casual for something that could’ve ended a career. “Selected” carries the prestige; “got cancelled” lands like a clerical mishap. The whiplash is the point. In a few words he captures how astronaut mythology is built on bureaucratic roulette as much as courage.

The context matters. The Manned Orbiting Laboratory was the Air Force’s bid to put people in orbit for reconnaissance and experimentation, a Cold War project born from the belief that eyeballs in space might beat cameras on satellites. By ’69, technology and budgets had shifted; unmanned systems were cheaper, less politically risky, and improving fast. The cancellation wasn’t just a program ending, it was a quiet verdict on an entire theory of what “manned” spaceflight was for.

Crippen’s “NASA ended up taking half of us” does two things. It reminds you that the astronaut corps was (and is) an ecosystem: military pipelines, institutional handoffs, careers shaped by interagency compromise. It also undersells the emotional reality: to be “taken” is to be drafted into a new narrative, one that rebrands military hardware and training into civil exploration. The subtext is survival and adaptability. Even astronauts, the supposed masters of the frontier, are subject to the gravity of politics.