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Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Crippen

"The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space"

About this Quote

Crippen’s praise lands with the calm insistence of someone who has strapped himself to the verdict. Calling the shuttle a “fantastic vehicle” isn’t marketing copy; it’s an astronaut’s shorthand for a machine that worked often enough to become ordinary in the most un-ordinary environment imaginable. The key move is the double framing: awe (“unlike any other thing”) paired with a blunt metric (“several hundred people”). That pivot from wonder to headcount is the subtext. The shuttle’s real cultural achievement wasn’t just reaching space; it normalized access to it, turning spaceflight from a rare, flags-and-footprints event into something closer to an operational system with crews, schedules, repeat missions.

Context matters: Crippen flew on STS-1, the first shuttle flight, when “vehicle” still sounded aspirational and failure was not hypothetical. His language carries that early-program pride: the shuttle as a singular artifact of American engineering ambition, designed to be reused, to haul satellites, labs, and humans as if space were a worksite. The emphasis on “capabilities” signals what NASA sold to Congress and the public: versatility, payload, routine.

There’s a quiet defensiveness in the admiration, too. “Several hundred people” reads like a rebuttal to the program’s detractors, especially in the shadow of Challenger and Columbia, when the shuttle became a national lesson in how technological grandeur coexists with fragility. Crippen’s intent feels less like nostalgia than a claim: whatever the shuttle’s compromises and costs, it expanded the human presence in orbit in a way no previous craft did, and that scale is its argument.

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TopicScience
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Crippen, Robert. (2026, January 16). The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-space-shuttle-has-been-a-fantastic-vehicle-it-102579/

Chicago Style
Crippen, Robert. "The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-space-shuttle-has-been-a-fantastic-vehicle-it-102579/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The space shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle. It is unlike any other thing that we've ever built. Its capabilities have carried several hundred people into space." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-space-shuttle-has-been-a-fantastic-vehicle-it-102579/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Robert Crippen (born September 11, 1937) is a Astronaut from USA.

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