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"From our position on the Earth it is difficult to observe where the earth is and where it's going, or what its future course might be. Hopefully, by getting a little farther away, both in the real sense and the figurative sense, we'll be able to make some people step back and reconsider their mission in the universe, to think of themselves as a group of people who constitute the crew of a spaceship going through the universe. If you're going to run a spaceship, you've got to be pretty cautious about how you use your resources, how you use your crew, and how you treat your spacecraft.

Hopefully the trips to the moon we will be making in the next couple of decades will open up our eyes a little. When you are looking at the Earth from the lunar distance, its atmosphere is just unobservable. The atmosphere is so thin, and such a minute part of the earth, that it can't be sensed at all.

That should impress everyone.

The atmosphere of the earth is a small and valuable resource. We're going to have to learn how to conserve it and use it wisely. Down in the crowd you are aware of the atmosphere and it seems adequate, so you don't worry about it too much. But from a different vantage point, perhaps it is possible to understand more easily why we should be worrying."

Neil Armstrong, 1969