[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 68 (Thursday, May 17, 2001)]
[House]
[Page H2315]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                REAFFIRM COMMITMENT TO SPACE EXPLORATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Lampson) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LAMPSON. Mr. Speaker, I want to first compliment the gentleman 
from Florida (Mr. Weldon) for the comments he just made, and I want to 
talk also about space.
  Obviously, some of us are significantly dedicated to this issue in 
this Congress and in this country of ours. The work the gentleman has 
done and the work I have the honor to be able to participate in is most 
appreciated, and that has to be infectious and carry over to every 
Member of this House of Representatives and our Senate to move forward 
with this.
  In starting, I want to talk first about a little girl whose name is 
Keely Woodruff. She is a little beyond this now, but when she came to 
me a couple of years ago, at 6 years old, she was having in excess of 
50 epileptic seizures a day. This little girl had been to the emergency 
room so many times that her parents could not even count them. She had 
the developmental age of about 2\1/2\ and did not have much to live for 
in her life.
  Interestingly enough, her doctor found a company in Clear Lake, 
Texas, in Houston, Texas, called Cyberonics; and Cyberonics had 
developed and markets today a takeoff on one of those spinoffs from 
space, a spinoff from a heart pacemaker called a vagus nerve 
stimulator. This little device was implanted under Keely's skin, with a 
little wire run up to the vagus nerve in her brain which began to 
control the impulses in her brain, and it changed her life. She has now 
set out on normalcy within that life of hers.

                              {time}  1445

  What a magnificent thing space did for Keely Woodruff. She had no 
idea what space even was.
  Mr. Speaker, all of that got started 40 years ago when John Kennedy 
stood here in this room and told this body, ``With the approval of this 
Congress, we have undertaken in the past year a great new effort in 
outer space. Our aim is not simply to be the first on the moon, any 
more than Charles Lindbergh's real aim was to be the first in Paris. 
His aim was to develop the techniques of our own country and other 
countries in the field of air and the atmosphere, and our objective in 
making this effort, which we hope will place one of our citizens on the 
moon is to develop in a new frontier of science, commerce and 
cooperation, the position of the United States and the Free World. This 
Nation belongs among the first to explore it, and among the first, if 
not the first, we shall be.''
  John Kennedy later challenged this country by saying that we would be 
able to send a man to the moon and bring him home safely within 10 
years from the time he challenged us. And our country rose 
magnificently to that challenge, and we created a whole new world in 
the conveniences that we receive, our ability today to communicate 
instantly from anywhere we stand around the world, and medical advances 
that cannot be compared to any other time in our world.
  What a magnificent legacy he left us. Today we have satellites that 
spin above our atmosphere around the Earth. We have the International 
Space Station that the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) spoke of, 
but today that dream is somewhat clouded.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to challenge my colleagues today that it is time 
for us to change that vision back to what our country shared in the 
1960s and the 1970s through the Apollo program, when our commitment 
budgetarily was 4 percent of the budget to go into space. And my 
colleagues in the House today, we are doing much more in space than we 
were doing then, but we are doing it with six-tenths of 1 percent of 
our budget.
  The commitment that we made to change the world is not as strong 
today as it was 40 years ago. Something is wrong there. We have to 
change that lack of commitment back into the vision that can make the 
difference for the little girls that are going to follow, like Keely 
Woodruff, who might need the advance to save their life. Instead of it 
being a vagus nerve stimulator, what else might it be able to be to 
change that life?
  If we fail to enact that vision that we planned at the International 
Space Station, to have seven scientists up there, to have a vehicle 
that can return them safely if there needs to be, like a crew return 
vehicle which we have begun to work on, if we fail to make the 
commitment, even to find the extra $300 million that we have asked for 
in this Congress, then something is wrong.
  Then that is our challenge, colleagues, and ladies and gentlemen of 
this country. It is time to reaffirm our commitment and to go forward 
and see our dream accomplished in space.

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