Bill Nelson: “NASA represents the best of what we can do as a people, and NASA is one of the last refuges of partisan politics.”

Our seed corn is research and development. We do not want to ever give that up, and that is the mission of NASA.

We cannot operate our science agencies on the cheap, and we should not operate them without clear, multi-year direction.

One of the reasons you and I were able to accomplish so much on this committee is both of us worked very hard to keep politics out of NASA and to focus on the core mission of exploration.

That's like eating our seed corn. We're not going to have anything to plant next year in the quest of trying to understand what is part of the statutes for NASA, which is to search for life, and therefore to understand who we are, what we…