Political Quotes

“yesterday the space shuttle Atlantis came back in the early morning darkness with those xenon lights illuminating that 3-mile-long runway at the Kennedy Space Center. That is a location that a century ago a set of grandparents of mine had homesteaded under the old Homestead Act, worked the land for the required 4 years. I have a copy of the deed signed by Woodrow Wilson in 1917 to my grandparents. Over three-quarters of a century later, the thought was not lost on me, when we went in that early morning darkness to the launchpad, that my grandparents would have never, ever believed that, so many years later, a grandson was going to literally leave the face of the Earth from almost the old homestead where they had to swat mosquitoes and fight off rattlesnakes and alligators as they eked a living out of that Florida soil. That was the location Atlantis came back to yesterday morning after a 13-day flawless mission after having been launched by the finest launch team in the world. That launch team is now having to disperse in part because we are shutting down the space shuttle program after 30 glorious years. It is an incredible flying machine, with 135 very successful missions that allowed us to do incredible work in space with human beings interacting and, of course, 2 tragic missions--the destruction of Challenger on ascent 25 years ago and the destruction of Columbia on reentry just a few years ago, in the early part of this last decade.…”