“The public IS excited about space but we have to give them something. We’ve given them NOTHING. The Space Station was a massive strategic error. For the cost of that, we could have had dozens of satellites across the entire solar system now. Dozens of landers on every single planet, on every moon of every planet, sending multimedia images back to earth. THAT is the cost of that space station, including launch costs.The entire solar system would have been covered.”

Story never finished school, ran off to Korea with the U.S. Marines where he was an aircraft electrician and an engine mechanic. He started flying with the Marines and over the next 55 years accumulated 18,000 hours in over 160 aircraft. He is a parachutist with over 800 freefalls. He has 7 graduate degrees in math, computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and psychology. He has been awarded 20 honorary doctorates. He was a part-time trauma surgeon during his 30 year astronaut career. Story was an NASA astronaut for over 30 years and flew on six spaceflights. He performed the first shuttle spacewalk on Challenger’s first flight, was a pilot on an astronomy mission, conducted two classified DOD missions, was the lead spacewalker on the Hubble Telescope repair mission and on his last flight, he operated an electronic chip manufacturing satellite on Columbia.