[KevinDavis]

"I certainly do not feel like a weight has been lifted, other than to recognize, as I continually do ... I think the words 'routine' [and] 'human spaceflight' don't go in the same sentence. Every one of these things is, if not frankly experimental, right on the edge of that.

"A comment that I'm fond of, and I've made before, but some of you may have forgotten so I'll make it again: I was a teenager, or a very young engineer, when we were flying the X-15 - and we flew 199 flights with that vehicle. And ... of course, its performance envelope was a small fraction of what the shuttle achieves. Nobody ever thought that that was anything other than an experimental vehicle - and that's what we have here.

"I think I also said, not terribly long ago, that if you think about it ... it took Western Europeans, and then North Americans, 1,000 years from being able to put Viking ships out into the open ocean to get to the point where nowadays we can load up cargo in an oil tanker and sail it halfway around the world, and almost every single time we do that, it gets there. But it took us 1,000 years to learn how to do that.

"We've been doing this stuff for 50 years. I think that is the perspective that we have to get. The enterprise is eminently worth doing. It's part of what makes us human. It is crucial that this nation does it. But we should recognize where we are in the process. We are just learning. And that's what you see us doing here today."

[KevinDavis]

[thoughtomator]

Because Muslims can't follow us there.

[tomzz]

You might have noticed that the human race appears to have only about 3000 years worth of history despite being somewhat older than that? One reason for going into near space is to try to get a bit more of a handle on our own history. Take Mars, in particularly those megaliths in the Cydonia region for instance:

There just MIGHT be writings inside that thing which might give us a bit more of a handle on whatever calamity made Mars the way it is now, and left us with just 3000 years worth of recorded history.

[pcottraux]

Why Go to Space?

Because it isn't there.

[NonValueAdded]

That was quite the press conference. Glad he is at the helm.

[nuke rocketeer]

I still think that if we are going back to the future, we should have gone back to this...

instead of Apollo redux.