That Was A Real Fireball.

To Sit Back And Let Fate Play Its Hand Out And Never Influence It Is Not The Way Man Was Meant To Operate.

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.

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.

On K-12 Education America Has Gone Down, Down, Down Compared To The Other Nations. It Doesn't Mean That We Have Gotten Dumber. It Just Means That We Have Not Advanced As Fast In Those Areas As Other Nations Have Done, And We're Way Down Right Now.

That Whole Day [ Of The Space Flight] Is Very Vividly Impressed On My Memory Because It Was Such A New Experience. We Hadn't Done That Before. And Then I've Recalled It So Often Since Then I Think That It's A - It's Remained Very Vivid Over The Past 50 Years, Seems To Me Like About A Week Or Two Instead Of 50 Years.