Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, currently the host of the new COSMOS series on PBS, author of a number of books on astronomy, including one of the best introductory textbooks in astronomy on the market, and an avid educator, gave the keynote speech at the 28th National Space Symposium in April of 2012. It runs about an hour and can be watched on YouTube here.
Dr. Tyson is always fun to watch, but this speech is serious and exceptional. He makes a very persuasive case that space exploration has been in the past a major shaper and driver of the American culture and economy, and could be again if only we, the voting population, would demand that our government fund it appropriately. As he has pointed out, humorously, in many previous talks, just the amount of money we gave the banks in the 2008 bailout is more money that the NASA space program has been budgeted in its entire 50 year history.
The core of his argument is that having a challenging national frontier to explore - like space - is what gives a civilization hope and vision and excitement and common purpose, and what excites and stimulates our children to study and learn and become scientists and engineers and innovaters and enter other highly-productive economy-driving fields.
I very highly recommended this video.
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