I was scheduled to graduate from high school in 1943, but I was in a course that was supposed to give us four years of high school plus a year of college in our four years. So by the end of my junior year, I would have had enough credits to graduate from high school.

We live in a technical society.

I believe that there will be women astronauts sometime just as there are women airplane pilots.

All of the stars rotate, have orbits around the center of the galaxy, and most of them go around the center of the galaxy in nearly circular orbits. They vary a little bit from circular, but they're predominantly circular.

Just as the lunar landings inspired many young people to consider careers in space and related fields, the solution of the challenging instrumentation problems presented in space science can inspire young people to push beyond the current state of the art.

In 1956, I received an invitation to a dedication of an observatory in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Armenia, as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

One of the primary ways that astronomers study stars is to spread their light out into a rainbow, which we call a spectrum, and from that rainbow, we can learn something about what the stars are composed of and how hot they are, how bright they are, and how they're moving, at least how they're moving toward or away from us.

You cannot exploit the advantages of getting above the atmosphere unless you are able to get up there reasonably large-sized telescopes and unless you are able to keep these telescopes pointing at one region of the sky for long periods of time to a high degree of accuracy.

A few months after NASA was formed, I was asked if I knew anyone who would like to set up a program in space astronomy.

Many societal problems concern science, such as the energy crisis, genetic alterations of foods.