[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 19]
[House]
[Pages 26675-26676]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1545
                        SPUTNIK 50TH ANNIVERSARY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Clay). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to take the 
opportunity to recognize the importance to our Nation of what happened 
50 years ago today.
  On October 4, 1957, Russia launched Sputnik I, the first artificial 
satellite to successfully be placed in orbit around the Earth. On that 
day, Americans were shocked, and many believed that we were no longer 
the technological leader of the world.

[[Page 26676]]

  On that day Americans realized that, like never before, our homeland 
was threatened. This was significant, because the leader of the Nation 
that launched Sputnik, Nikita Khrushchev, less than a year earlier had 
aggressively delivered to America the now-famous threat, ``We will bury 
you.''
  To many Americans, Sputnik was a major step showing how the Russians 
were starting to make good on their promise, and it was a promise that 
America had to counter and nullify before it was too late. The 
reverberations of Sputnik and its launch were felt many years 
thereafter.
  Thankfully, our Nation got busy after October 4, 1957, to ensure that 
our space program became second to none. We began an aggressive effort 
to educate and train a new generation of engineers and technicians, and 
we began the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs and ultimately, of 
course, putting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin successfully on the Moon 
and bringing them home safely.
  Since then, of course, we have built the most versatile and complex 
machine ever made by man, the space shuttle. We have constructed the 
International Space Station.
  I am proud of what we have accomplished with our space program, and 
now we are moving forward with the next step in human space flight, the 
Constellation program, which will, again, carry us back to the Moon 
and, with international cooperation, on to Mars. But we are, today, 
facing another watershed moment in the history of our space program.
  By 2010, the space shuttle is scheduled to end its over quarter 
century of operations. While this is a sad time for many, it will also 
allow us to continue on into the future with the Constellation program. 
Unfortunately, Constellation is not set to begin space flight until 
2015.
  What will America's manned space flight program be doing to put men 
and women into space between 2010 and 2015? Quite puzzlingly, we will 
be asking the Russians, the country that agreed to bury us 50 years 
ago, to launch our astronauts into orbit.
  Now, I supported President Bush's announced plan in 2004 to someday 
retire the space shuttle and replace it with a new, safer and less 
expensive system to operate that could go back to the Moon and on to 
Mars, but I was critical of the President at the time, with his notion 
that we retire the shuttle in 2010 and not launch the new system until 
2015, and that we rely, of all places, on Russia to launch our 
astronauts into orbit. Yet, today, that is what we are planning on 
doing.
  What is very troubling about our relationship with Russia, while we 
have had good cooperation with them in recent years, there have been 
problems, problems with proliferating weapons of mass destruction to 
rogue nations such as Iran. Indeed, this body passed the Iran 
Nonproliferation Act, and then we had to go back and amend it to allow 
our current cooperation with the Russians.
  Then, of course, more recently, the Russians have engaged in a number 
of behaviors that I consider to be very ominous for our future 
relationship with them, placing a Russian flag on the bottom of Arctic 
Circle and claiming the Arctic bottoms resources for Russia.
  The Russians have bitterly opposed our deployment of missile defense 
systems to protect us against Iran in Europe. The Russian leader, 
President Putin, has claimed that it will lead to a new missile race, 
and he has, indeed, threatened to specifically target European 
capitals. Is Russia trying to bring back the Cold War? It has 
reinitiated its bomber patrols, patrolling our NATO allies.
  I think if you add up all of these things and their recent abrogation 
of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which placed 
restrictions on conventional forces, I think this does not bode well to 
our continued reliance on the Russians in the years ahead, and we need 
a new plan to deal with our manned space flight program in the years 
ahead.

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