Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I will conclude my remarks by just bringing you back to the vision that I had in the window of a spacecraft orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes. An hour of that was in the daylight of the sun and about a half-hour of that in the shadow of the Earth, which is the nighttime, looking at how beautiful the Earth was, and yet it looked so fragile. You could look at the rim of the Earth, that bright blue band, but right underneath it you could see that very thin atmosphere that supports all of our life. With the naked eye, from that altitude in the spacecraft orbiting the planet, you could actually see how we are messing it up. You could see this in flight 34 years ago. As a matter of fact, our first launch attempt, 34 years today, took us five tries to get off the ground, but once we did, we could see with the naked eye how we are messing it up. Coming across Madagascar, the island nation off the southeast coast of the continent of Africa, you could see they had cut down all the trees. You could immediately see the effects because when the rains came, there was no vegetation to hold the topsoil, and the topsoil was all running down. From that altitude, looking down, you could see that silt going out into the bright blue waters of the Indian Ocean. With the naked eye, you can see that. It is such a beautiful planet. We best take care of it. Indeed, that was the effect upon me of having gone into space.…”