Political Quotes

“I want to speak about a very uplifting topic in more ways than one. Friday morning I was at the Cape. We call it the Cape. It is technically known as the Kennedy Space Center. America is going to Mars. The first test flight, the spacecraft Orion, put upon another rocket--in this case, a heavy-lift rocket called the Delta IV--twice orbited around the Earth. On that second orbit it was boosted up way beyond low-Earth orbit to 3,600 miles, and then with a ballistic reentry simulating 80 percent of the forces, the stresses on the spacecraft, the Gs, as well as the heat shield heating up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a spacecraft totally instrumented to check out the integrity of the spacecraft and the effectiveness of the heat shield as part of it--an ablative heat shield that burns off upon reentry--and it was a fantastic success. I talked about this last week ahead of time just to give folks an idea of how large this is. The Apollo spacecraft was 12 feet in diameter. It looked like a similar kind of shape, a capsule. That was over four decades ago, 12 feet. Orion is 16\1/2\ feet and totally new technology, a new heat shield and up-to-date instrumentation that will carry four astronauts on our goal of our journey to the planet Mars in the decade of the 2030s. This is what I wanted to share. Friday night after the launch with the extensive coverage that the news media gave, I was at a totally unrelated charity event for a children's hospital.…”