Ron Klein: “Many of us in the freshman class came to this year's campaign and this Congress with a view that this is an opportunity…”

“Many of us in the freshman class came to this year's campaign and this Congress with a view that this is an opportunity of historic proportion. This is an opportunity for us to recognize that this is a once-in-a-generation calling, no different than our predecessors had with the Manhattan Project. I know that many seniors in my district in south Florida have talked about that, the calling of their generation to make sure that World War II would end with an atomic weapon. Of course we all know that when Sputnik went up in the early 1960s, a little before my time, but at a time when this country saw this little tin can up in space and thought this could be a threat of possibly bombs coming from outer space into our country, and John F. Kennedy saw this as a time and place for us to engage our private sector, our universities, our public, to create a new generation of scientists and mathematicians who would put a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. By 1969, they did that.”