The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that NASA's contributions are significant enough that they shouldn't have to justify their funding every year.
Neil Degrasse Tyson argues that NASA is an unparalleled economic driver and should not be required to defend its budget annually. He suggests that the transformative impacts of NASA on the economy and technological advancement are self-evident and merit continued support without the constraints of justifying its funding to Congress every year.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech advocating for increased funding for space programs.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
Let me tell you something about full moons: kids don't care about full moons. They'll play in a full moon, no worries at all. They only get scared of magic or werewolves from stupid adults and their stupid adult stories.
One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.
Q: What were you thinking when your colleagues were out there making cosmic history? A: I just kept reminding myself that every single component in this spacecraft was provided by the guy who submitted the cheapest tender.
Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
Receiving the National Medal of Science is the thrill of a lifetime, but good science does not happen in isolation.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.