NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Excerpts from President Obama’s speech at the Kennedy Space Center on April. 15, in which he provides details about the new course set for NASA and America’s space program by his fiscal year 2011 budget request. The President’s visit and speech coincided with a one-day Conference on the American Space Program for the 21st Century,” hosted by NASA at Kennedy. The space conference featured a diverse group of senior officials, space leaders, academic experts, industry leaders and others with specific expertise or interests participating in four concurrent sessions each focusing on a different aspect of the President's new direction for the agency.

For more information: www.nasa.gov

President Obama

Cut 1 - (:46) "Let me start by being extremely clear. I am 100% committed to the mission of NASA and its future because broadening our capabilities in space will continue to serve our society in ways that we can scarcely imagine, because exploration will inspire, once more, wonder in a new generation, sparking passions and launching careers; and because, ultimately, if we fail to press forward in the pursuit of discovery we are ceding our future and we are ceding that essential element of the American character."
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Cut 2 - (:07) "We start by increasing NASA's budget by six billion dollars over the next five years."
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Cut 3 - (: 25) "No one is more committed to human exploration of space, to manned space flight, than I am, but we've got to do it in a smart way, and we can't doing the same old things that we've been doing, and thinking that somehow, it's going to get us to where we want to go.
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Cut 4 - (:26) -- "We will actually reach space faster, and more often, under this new plan, in ways that will help us improve our technological capacity and lower our costs which are both essential for the long term sustainability of space flight. In fact, throughout plan, we'll be sending many more astronauts into the space over the next decade."
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Cut 5 - (:20) "Early in the next decade, a set of crude flights will test and prove the systems required for exploration beyond lower earth orbit, and 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the, first ever, crude missions beyond the moon into deep space."
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Cut 6 - (:21) "Critical to deep space exploration, will be the development of breakthrough propulsion systems and other advance technologies. So, I'm challenging NASA to break through these barriers, and we'll you the resources to break through these barriers, and I know you will, with ingenuity and intensity because that's what you've always done."
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Cut 7 - (:20) -- "I believe it more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach and operate at a series of increasingly demanding targets while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward, and that's what this strategy does, and that's how we'll insure that our leadership in space in stronger in this new century than it was in the last."
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Cut 8 - (:24) I'm proposing a 40 million dollar initiative led by a high-level team from White House, NASA, and other agencies to develop a plan for regional economic growth and job creation, and I expect this plan to reach my desk by August 15."
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Cut 9 - (:17) "For pennies on the dollar, the space program has fueled jobs and entire industries. For pennies on the dollar, has improved our lives, advanced our society, strengthened our economy and inspired generations of Americans, and I have no doubt that NASA can continue to fulfill this role."
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