Political Quotes

“I wish to address the issue of America's space program. Some very disturbing news has come out over the course of the Appropriations Committee's deliberations on the House-passed Commerce- State-Justice appropriations bill, which, it is my understanding, has passed the House. It includes the funding for NASA. What is disturbing about it is that at a time when we are recognizing that Vladimir Putin is increasingly trying to thwart the interests of the United States with his aggressiveness and invasion of Ukraine, his threats to the Baltic States, his invasion of that part of Ukraine known as Crimea, and the various other semi-threats he has made to us, it would certainly seem to be in the interests of the United States that where we have a joint shared and mutually agreed-to space program which goes all the way back to 1975 when in the middle of the Cold War an American spacecraft rendezvoused and docked with a Russian spacecraft, Soyuz-- and the Apollo-Soyuz mission made extraordinary political as well as scientific history for those two crews, led by Gen. Tom Stafford on the American side and General Alexei Leonov on the Soviet side. After they docked, those two crews lived together in space for 9 days in the middle of the Cold War, 1975. That set us on the course--with the Soviet Union still in existence--of starting to cooperate. We actually had an American space shuttle rendezvous and dock with the first Russian space station, MIR.…”