I would like to introduce and welcome professor
Hawking and Lucy.
Thank you all so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Can you hear me?
Why should we go into space?
What is the justification for
spending all that effort and money on getting
of few lumps of moon rock.
Aren't
there better causes here on earth?
We thought this was worth a big effort in
the sixties.
In 1962 President Kennedy permitted the U.S.
to landing a man on
the moon by the end of the decade.
This was achieved just in time by the Apollo
11 mission in 1969.
The space race
helped to create a fascination with science
and let a great advances in
technology including the first large-scale
integrated circuits which
are the basis of all modern computers.
A new interest in space would also
increase the public standing of science generally.
The low esteem in which
science and scientists are held is having
serious consequences.
We live in a
society that is increasingly governed by science
and technology yet fewer and
fewer young people want to go into science.
Professor Stephen Hawking is
arguably our greatest living cosmologists.
Struck down in his 20s by a
progressive motor neuron disease, he is entirely
paralyzed and can only
communicate using a speech synthesizer...but
when Professor Hawking speaks,
NASA listens.
I fear for our future.
Our planet Earth is threatened with an ever
expanding population and only finite resources.
We need a plan B.
If our
species is to survive the next hundred years
let alone a thousand that is
imperative we voyage out into the blackness
of space to colonize new
worlds across the cosmos.
The ISS is pioneering space exploration.
Without
this knowledge travel into deep space is impossible.
Within 50 years I have no
doubt there will be settlements on the moon
and by the end of the century
I truly hope humans will be living on Mars.
I think the work on the ISS will
take a new generation of human space explorers
out into our solar system and
beyond.
I would like to congratulate the new horizons
team, NASA on their pioneering
decade-long mission to explore the Pluto system
and the Kuiper belt.
Billions of miles from Earth this little robotic
spacecraft will show us the first
glimpse of mysterious Pluto, the distant icy
world on the very edge of our solar
system.
At fifty years since the first successful
mission from Earth, Mariner-4
sent back 21 images of the Red Planet.
Now the solar system will be further opened
up to us revealing the secrets of
distant Pluto.
The revelations of New Horizons may help us
to understand
better how our solar system was formed.
We explored because we are human and
we want to know.
I hope that Pluto will help us on that journey.
I will be watching
closely and I hope you will too.
