Most of our competitor nations around the world have a national education system and America is the only major nation in the world that operates off of local school boards. They receive very little direction from state boards of education or from the nation. So local school boards direct basically what happens and too often they're not willing to track or to do the supervision of the education system that will make it world competitive.

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.

I still have my [flight] license and I can still pass a flight physical.

To sit back and let fate play its hand out and never influence it is not the way man was meant to operate.

America is in a newly competitive position around the world, and unless we keep our lead in education for all of our people and do the research along with that, other nations will start outdoing us and they will be leaders in the world.

I still love to fly and I'll never get over that.