Bill Nelson: “Secretary Rumsfeld, the recent Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy has the Nation reassessing the value of space 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…

When we find those, by the way, not only looking for life, we start to understand their development, and we better understand who we are, why we are here, how we got here, and all of this evolution of the cosmos.

Look what happened when we spent the money on the Apollo program. Two generations of technology development came out of it.

All of us have a responsibility to protect our home planet. After all, it's the only one we have.