“The nations of the world, seeking a basis for their own futures, continually pass judgment on our ability as a nation to make decisions, to concentrate effort, to manage vast and complex technological programs in our own interest.  It is not too much to say that in many ways the viability of representative government and of the free enterprise system in a period of revolutionary changes based on science and technology is being tested in space . . . [Society has] reached a point where its progress and even its survival increasingly depend on our ability to organize the complex and do the unusual.  We cannot do these things except through large aggregations of resources and power.  [It is] revolution from above.”

–James Webb, former NASA Administrator, 16 November 1963