In America, we have no means of getting to our own Space Station. We have to pay the Russians to put our people up there to send them into space - rendezvous with the Station and bring them back at the end of their stay, and that to me is just wrong. We're supposed to be the world's greatest space-faring nation, and to cancel our own means of getting there I thought was a mistake, even though it would save some money.

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.

We thought that the odds of things working OK were up in the upper 90 percent or we wouldn't have gone. But the - there were some problems cropped up on the flight but was able to take care of those OK and - although they were things that we hadn't really trained that much for. But it was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology.

As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind - every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.

America put more money into research, into the new and the unknown than any nation in history, and the same thing with education, and those two things led us into a worldwide preeminence in a very short period of time.

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.

That was a real fireball.