Political Quotes

“We are doing this on the space station right now. We are putting together tools so that if we don't have a tool in space or if we were on the long journey to Mars and we did not have a tool that we needed to repair something, we could send the messages up to the spacecraft and 3-D print the tools that we need. So long-term space missions like the one to Mars are going to benefit from this onboard manufacturing capability. Spare parts--what happens if we get up there and we don't have enough? Well, we can print it. Engineers are even experimenting with creating a completely 3-D printed high-performance rocket engine. Can my colleagues believe that? So that would advance manufacturing technologies that could benefit a number of us right here on the face of the Earth. So the excitement of this--even though some would look at the President's request for NASA and see that it is $600 million over what he requested last year, but it is actually almost flat-line to what we actually appropriated. Don't be discouraged by that because in this sense the excitement is gathering as we are about to launch humans-- Americans on American rockets. That is going to occur next year, as we send crews to and from the International Space Station. As a result, we therefore do not have to rely on the proven Russian Soyuz that gets our crews to and from today. Now we will have the capability of not only transporting cargo to and from but our American astronauts.…”