Bolden: 50 Years Later "We Are Just Getting Started"

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s historic spaceflight, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in a statement today that “we are still driven to reach for new heights in human exploration” and “we are just getting started.”

Calling May 5, 1961 “a good day,” Bolden noted that he was a teenager at the time and while “I never dared dream it growing up in segregated South Carolina, I was proud to follow in Alan’s footsteps several years later and become a test pilot myself.”

The statement went on to extol the Obama Administration’s policy of using NASA to facilitate the development of commercial crew for access to low Earth orbit, “allowing NASA to focus on those bigger, more challenging destinations and to enable our science missions to peer farther and farther beyond our solar system.”