IT IS with great pleasure today that I sign into law S.J. Res. 37, designating the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston as the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.
Few men in our time have better understood the value of space exploration than Lyndon Johnson.
It was he, as a Senator, who wrote, introduced, and helped to enact the legislation which created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He called it the proudest legislative achievement of his years in the Congress.
As Vice President, he was Chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council in the critical, early years of exploration when the groundwork was laid, and the determination made to put a man on the Moon.
Finally, as President, he oversaw the first flights of the Apollo Moon landing program, and he did it in a way that led people beyond the adventure and the pride to the deeper meaning and the deeper benefits of space exploration. Speaking at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston on March 1, 1968, he summed up this Nation's purpose in outer space: "... we do not build rockets and spacecraft to fly our flag in space, or to plant our banner on the surface of the Moon.
"Instead we work and we build and we create to give all mankind its last great heritage. We are truly reaching for the stars."
By his vision and his work and his support, Lyndon Johnson drew America up closer to the stars, and before he died he saw us reach the Moon--the first great plateau along the way.