In a letter to NASA administrator Richard Truly, Vice President Dan Quayle, head of the National Space Council, simply dismissed the concerns of the scientific community; science, he shrugged, is only one motivation for building a space station--and not even the most important one. In an apparent reference to the panel's concern that there would be insufficient electrical power on board for scientific experiments, Quayle wrote: "The importance of the Space Station is not in the power of its circuits; it is in the size of the dream."
There you have it. It's the dream that matters. And so it was at the birth of the space station initiative, Jan. 25, 1984, on the occasion of President Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address. "We can follow our dreams to distant stars," he said, "living and working in space for peaceful economic and scientific gain. Tonight I am directing NASA ...
