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.