The planet Earth is very special. It has masses of land, great oceans, and an atmosphere. Its interior and its skin even its place and motion in space combine to form the environment needed to support life—and especially intelligent life. In this environment man has evolved. Today he has the freedom of sailing on his oceans, and even the freedom of flying in the atmosphere.
Now, just within the last dozen years, man has discovered that he can also have the freedom of space. He has packaged important features of his environment, and has taken the first small and tentative steps beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Man has learned that he is no longer bound to Earth, and he will surely want to take increasingly bigger steps into space. He will do this first as an adventurer, and then as an explorer and a scientist, and he will do it because his security and even his survival depend on it.
Dr. George M. Low, former NASA Administrator, 1971
