Nick Lampson: “Mr. Speaker, the space age arrived with a roar of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, which propelled our Nation, the leader…”

“Mr. Speaker, the space age arrived with a roar of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, which propelled our Nation, the leader of the free world, into a space race. We recognized we faced a challenge, and we responded. We made smart investments in our people and in knowledge acquisition to enable us to compete technologically. Specifically, we invested in what we now call STEM education, and we invested in science and engineering research. Those investments brought us preeminence in a new area of endeavor, and they inspired a generation of engineers and scientists. And just 12 years later, two Americans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, stood on the surface of the Moon. The competition with the Soviet Union on a world stage is what drove us initially, but it was strongly coupled with America's innate yearning to explore and discover. America was settled by people who already had lives elsewhere, but who wanted something more. They wanted to find out what was over the horizon. They wanted to determine if there was a better way. We are here today, we are the beneficiaries of that restless energy and that hard work. An array of spacecraft high above works for us. Satellites monitor weather and climate, forest fires, pollution, the growth of cities, and even the shrinking of ice mass. They augment our infrastructure by providing positioning information, and television, radio, telephone and e-mail communications.”