Daily Inspiration Quote by Pete Conrad

Conrad is doing something more interesting than cheerleading a program: he’s pricing awe in the language Congress understands. The repetition of “I think” reads like a man anticipating the audience’s skepticism, then refusing to flinch. He starts with the headline figure - a billion per launch - the number critics loved to weaponize. Then he immediately reframes it: the Shuttle is “worth two billion dollars for what it does.” That jump isn’t a math error; it’s a provocation. He’s asserting that the obvious accounting ledgers are missing the real ledger: capability.

As an astronaut, Conrad isn’t selling romance about “the final frontier.” He’s arguing for infrastructure. The Shuttle wasn’t just a rocket; it was a reusable, crewed truck to orbit that could deploy satellites, run experiments, and service hardware in space. In the late Cold War, those tasks had strategic value even when the talking points stayed safely “scientific.” His phrasing keeps the details abstract - “what it does,” “the work it does” - because the strongest case for the Shuttle wasn’t always public-facing, and because capability sells better than a spreadsheet of line items.

The subtext is defensive pride shot through with hard-earned pragmatism. Conrad, a veteran of Apollo’s simpler, more heroic era, is staking a claim that big national projects can’t be judged like consumer products. The Shuttle’s price tag is the scandal; its versatility is the argument. He’s asking listeners to decide whether a society that can build that machine should act like it can’t afford to use it.