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Home » Why We Go: Leaving Our Beautiful Home and Exploring Outer Space by Will Pomerantz (Transcript)

Why We Go: Leaving Our Beautiful Home and Exploring Outer Space by Will Pomerantz (Transcript)

 

Will Pomerantz

Here is the full transcript of Vice President of Special Projects at Virgin Galactic, Will Pomerantz’s TEDx Talk titled “Why We Go: Leaving Our Beautiful Home and Exploring Outer Space” at TEDxPCC event.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Why We Go – Leaving Our Beautiful Home and Exploring Outer Space by Will Pomerantz at TEDxPCC

 

William J. Pomerantz – Vice President of Special Projects at Virgin Galactic

Those of us who are passionate about exploring outer space tend to spend a lot of our time focused on the future. But just like people in every other profession with every other passion, we’re well served by remembering the lessons of history. And lately, there’s been one moment in history that’s really been bouncing around my brain quite a bit, and I’m not referring to that one from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. I’m referring to something a little bit closer to home.

It is September, 1962. President John F. Kennedy is addressing America to tell them what he’d already told Congress a few months earlier, which is that he believed we should dedicate ourselves as a nation to the goal of sending human beings to the moon and bringing them back safely before the decade of the 1960’s had ended.

Now if you remember a line from this speech, it almost certainly goes like this, and I’m not going to do the accent because my JFK really sounds more like Mayor Qiumby, but you have to imagine. He says, “We choose to go to the moon and do these other things in this decade not because they are easy but because they are hard.”

Now I wasn’t in the audience that day, I wasn’t alive on that day.