Space Program Funding Quotes

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 in the long run the money that s been put into the space program is one of the best investments this country has ever made . . .This is a downpayment on the future of mankind. It's as simple as that.

I think both the space shuttle program and the International Space Station program have not really lived up to their expectations.

I'm not in favor of manned spaceflight, because I don't see that it goes anywhere.

You get to a certain moment where you realize all those humans who landed on the moon did so in between Chris [Nolan] being born and me being born and no one had gone back since, all these Super-8 films we grew up watching of rocket launches, you get to a certain age and you realize all the speeches about going back, they're speeches, there's no money there, we're not going back.

I think the only way that the U.S. human spaceflight program is going to get really revitalized, really put sort of an Apollo level push on it, is if some other country, perhaps China, were to actually have a landed flight to the moon and brought back our American flag and put it in Tiananmen Square.

I'm substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They're sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they're hitting back and forth.

The President wants to go to the moon. We hardly have enough money left in the treasury to go to Baltimore.

I think the Space Shuttle is worth one billion dollars a launch. I think that it is worth two billion dollars for what it does. I think the Shuttle is worth it for the work it does.

I'm hoping that the suspension of the space program is just that, a suspension, and that it's not the final say in the matter, because I think we need it.

There was a lot of risk taken in the Mercury and Apollo eras, and we don't take those risks anymore. We've designed the systems to eliminate risk, which makes it take forever and cost too much money.

Let's not spend resources that we don't need to be sending astronauts back to the moon. Let's not spend expensive resources on bringing people who have reached Mars back again. Prepare them to become a growing colony.

We have neglected our aerospace program, and I am detecting a lot of bipartisan support to continue that mission.

It is only by freeing NASA from routine human transport to low-Earth orbit that we can afford to once again see American astronauts exploring distant worlds.

If you could really guarantee that the money would be spent on something more worthwhile, I'd say, absolutely, scrap the space program, but it never works that way.

We are not building the space station for science any more than we went to the moon for science, but we got a hell of a lot of good science out of it.

Unfortunately as the result of the shutdown of the shuttle program, we lost an entire generation of people experience and capable of making risk judgment.

I don't think we're wasting people in space.

I'm a strong advocate of new missions to Venus.

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

Unfortunately, spaceflight takes a lot of time and money.

I think we need someone in a responsible political position to have the courage to say, 'Let's terminate human spaceflight.'

If leaders in the space program had at its beginning in the 1940s, pointed out the benefits to people on earth rather than emphasizing the search for proof of evolution in space, the program would have saved $100 billion in tax money and achieved greater results.