moon shot engineering tasks but it s worth remembering what was supposed to happen following the fulfillment of kennedy s vision and what happened instead. you see, apollo was supposed to be a beginning, not an end. nasa s space task group by 1969 envisions a first phase of apollo setting permanent shelters on the moon by 1973. permanent lunar habitation likely with supporting space station infrastructure was envisioned by 1980. a mars expedition building on the lunar experience was slated for 1983. instead of this study american progress towards colonizing the solar system, the final three apollo missions were scrubbed. instead, we spent the money on low earth orbit missions where we ve stayed for most of the past half-century. those missions are of course not without risk. my first memory a searing one familiar to so many children of the 80s, the challenger explosion. but that is not the reason we go to space. it is not the highest mountain. it s not lindbergh crossing the atlantic
this goal that we have in this country of getting back to doing great things. and as you know, i feel like this is something that really ought to unite us. it ought to bring us together, it ought to inspire us each as americans. what can we do to get back to that point? well, one of the greatness of the american system is the government, in the end, not at the center of our being. we are not the soviet union, we are not communist china, we are not cuba. we are, despite every effort of the left, we are still a free people and you can see that in space. the greatest breakthroughs in space right now are coming from two or three entrepreneurs and they are just doing it and i must abide in administration finds a way to cripple them, they are almost certainly going to take us to the moon and there almost certainly going to take us to mars and you re going to find your family having the option i think by the time that
they are 20, 25 years old to be able to consider seriously going to mars. these are not small things. it s ironic for people who sometimes complain about immigration. elon musk is one of the great contributors to america s future and he does it because it fills his ego needs. he didn t fill out a form for the government. the government has funded some of his projects, but he s undertaken things nobody thought possible. i also think that we have to look at, you know, if you wanted a really great goal for america, it would be to decide that every american who is truly going to have the ability to pursue happiness and that would require overhauling the schools. it would require providing physical safety and our biggest cities. it would require changing the tax law to make it very easy to run a small business. but if we took it seriously, roll up our sleeves, my guess is