Kay Bailey Hutchison: “I do admire the tenacity of the Senator from Arkansas, for he has tried 15 straight times to submarine the space…”

“I do admire the tenacity of the Senator from Arkansas, for he has tried 15 straight times to submarine the space station, in a mixed metaphor. But I do think the Senator is wrong. I think the Senate will rise above his arguments, which would have the world's greatest superpower saying to all of the other nations that have put their money into this project, we are going to walk away from an experimental project, 90 percent complete. This project is succeeding. What we are going to be able to do has already begun to be tested in the early stages, and that is use microgravity conditions to grow tissue, which you can't do on Earth. You can't simulate this procedure on Earth. It means we will be able to take defective tissues, without harming the patient, and experimenting without harming the patient. It is biomedical research. We have partners--the United States, Canada, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Spain, France, Germany, the UK, Japan, and Russia--in this project. Yes, the Russians are having trouble. We know that. Does that mean we will walk away from all of our other international partners? The United States has been the leader in technical advances. It is why we have been able to get all of the benefits that we have seen from space research, because we have been willing to take the risk. Experiments are not precise.”