Dana Rohrabacher: “Mr. Speaker, this is a fitting time for me to sort of step down because we had this tremendous success yesterday on…”

“Mr. Speaker, this is a fitting time for me to sort of step down because we had this tremendous success yesterday on Spaceship One. And one of my major goals as chairman of this committee was to make sure that commercial space remained an option so that in the future that we did not look at space as just an endeavor of the Federal Government, but instead looked at it as possibly offering services through the commercial sector and profit-making ventures as well as space exploration and some of the other types of things in space science that can only be done by the government itself or government working with private industry. So this great achievement of having a commercially sponsored and designed and paid-for spaceship that went into space and was capable of carrying passengers, this was a great success. And I want to commend everyone who was involved in the spaceship program. By the way, that was done in response to a prize, the X Prize, which offered a $10 million prize to anyone who could accomplish that mission. And I will be introducing legislation within the next few days to try to systemize the prize concept encouraging space endeavors in developing new technologies.”