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I want to start off with a quote from a famous aviator, French aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery,
this quote may be known to some of you but I think it bears repeating, often. If you
want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks
and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we
do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens,
that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston,
a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new
metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses
several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than
the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control,
communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and
then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles
per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot
as it is here today--and do all this, and do all this, and do it right, and do it first
before this decade is out--then we must be bold.
When I think of our golden era of space exploration, the late 1950s right on up through the early
1970s, over that time very few weeks would go by before there would be an article in
a newspaper, in a magazine, where cover story would extol the city of tomorrow, transportation
of tomorrow, the home of tomorrow, even food of tomorrow and what matters, are the cultural
shifts and how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily life,
because as the Seventies drew to a close we stopped advancing the space frontier, the
tomorrow articles faded. We spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations
conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible
and others among them, those who saw what the previous generation had enabled, witness
the Apollo voyages to the moon, even if though they were not the participant. This is the
greatest adventure that ever was. Yet if all you do is coast, eventually you slow down
while others catch-up and pass you by.
It may seem at first sight that China is far behind the Soviet Union and the United States
but in fact China is doing this with 21st century technology.
China's economy is rocketing here on Earth so not too surprisingly is now rocketing away
from Earth. Beijing is betting big on the stars.
You know, putting an eight and a half ton laboratory manned or unmanned in space is
no small feat and think about the Chinese, they know where they are going and they know
when they are going to get there, they have a plan, they have a mission, they are looking
into the future and that is in dare contrast to our space program today.