Political Quotes

“Thank you, Ralph. Mr. Hall is the dean of the Texas delegation. We are awfully proud to have him. He has been working long and hard for many, many years to make sure that every time we shoot a human being into outer space we plan to bring them back. It's easy to develop a space program where you can say, well, if the guy we shoot out there, if we lose him, it's no big deal, we at least have the technology to learn how it works. There are some that have developed space programs this way, but we've never developed it that way. Some people would say we're a great dinosaur, this NASA. This great dinosaur comes from the basic premise, a part of what makes Americans great, that every human life is important. Therefore, you test and retest and retest again, and you take another path and you find a new direction until you are assured of one thing: That that precious human life you put upon that exploding bomb called a rocket, you're capable of putting that human life out into space and bringing that human being back alive. I would argue that we're the only space program where that has been a priority. What makes us so much more exceptional than others is because we've had accidents, but they were accidents. But our planned program didn't plan in expendability. We didn't plan for people to be expendable until we learned how to do it. We did it, we got through it, and we made it work.…”