Ed Markey: “46 years ago yesterday, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon. September will bring…”

“46 years ago yesterday, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon. September will bring the 53rd anniversary of President Kennedy's speech that launched America on the quest to land them on the Moon. He set that goal for the country not because it was easy but because it was hard. I am here to congratulate the men and women of the New Horizons mission for making the hard work of sending a spacecraft to Pluto look easy. One week ago today, what had once been a fuzzy picture of Pluto came into sharp focus. Dramatic transformations inspire everyone. As you can see, NASA delivered an amazing before-and-after story. Until the New Horizons flyby, the best picture we had of Pluto offered little detail of our neighbor at the edge of the solar system, but now we can see distinct features on its surface, including something that looks like a heart. Who couldn't love that. Thank you for this great picture. It took the New Horizons spacecraft 9\1/2\ years to cross the 3 billion miles between Pluto and Earth, but it was a mission much longer in the making. In the late 1980s, a group of scientists came together to advocate for sending a spacecraft to the edge of the solar system. Such a mission would tell us more about Pluto and once again push back the edge of the known frontier. Many of those scientists are still involved with the New Horizons mission, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's own Richard Binzel.…”