We Have An Infinite Amount To Learn

We're Going To Go To The Moon. We're Going To Go On To Mars. We're Going To Set Up A Base On The Moon. Ok, But No Money To Pay For It, Nothing In The Budget For It. And So The Decision Made At That Time Was To Cancel The Whole Shuttle Program To Save Money, Which I Think Was Very, Very Short Sighted.

I Think That It's Good For Us To Be Able To Travel In Space And Do Research In Space, And I Emphasize The Research, Because Space Travel To Me Is Far More Than Just Seeing How Far We Can Go.

That Whole Day [ Of The Space Flight] Is Very Vividly Impressed On My Memory Because It Was Such A New Experience. We Hadn't Done That Before. And Then I've Recalled It So Often Since Then I Think That It's A - It's Remained Very Vivid Over The Past 50 Years, Seems To Me Like About A Week Or Two Instead Of 50 Years.

Because Now, You Know, It's Going To Be A Number Of Years Yet Before We Have Our Own New Boosters And New Spacecraft To Go To Our Own International Space Station And Proceed With All The Research That We Spent $100 Billion Putting Up There To Give Us That Research Capability For The Future For People Right Here On Earth.

America Needs The Best Education System In The World. We Have It In Higher Education. We Do Not Have It In General Education For All Of Our People - The K-12 Education. Other Nations Are Far, Far Outdoing The United States In That Area. We Still Have The Lead In Research, But Once Again, Other Nations Are Pouring More Into Research Also. We Still Have A Lead, But To Me It's Just Very, Very Important That We Keep That Lead In Basic Research.