America had an emphasis on the individual and so education became available for everyone.

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

We had a lot of confidence that there was going to be a successful mission. We weren't off on some suicide effort, certainly [with Friendship 7].

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.

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.

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.