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.

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.

When others kid me about being bald, I simply tell them that the way I figure it, the good Lord only gave men so many hormones, and if others want to waste theirs on growing hair, that's up to them.

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.

This is a day we have managed to avoid for a quarter of a century. We've talked about it before and speculated about it, and it finally has occurred. We hoped we could push this day back forever.

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.

We used to joke about canned men, putting people in a can and seeing how far you can send them and bring them back. That's not the purpose of this program... Space is a laboratory, and we go into it to work and learn the new.