In an increasingly volatile and uncertain world, the men and women of the Iowa National Guard play a vital role in overseas contingency operations, domestic response missions and aggressive training exercises to remain a ready and reliable force.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

The SBA should be redirected to focus on its core missions of capital access, contracting, and counseling, while reducing duplication, overlap, and wasteful spending. Doing so will greatly improve its ability to better advocate for small businesses.

I would hope to get together with the Latino community, if I could ever have them talk to me without screaming and threatening me. So I hope to get together with the community and try to explain what we do, so that's going to be one of my missions coming up.

We're an organization with a clear objective: to protect the American people. We have a number of missions that feed into that, to protect America, and one of those missions we share with the council, which is to help our policymakers make sense of global events.

For long-duration exploration missions, NASA is looking for folks with a lot of operational, hands-on experience, people who have been in field-type situations such as military deployments. In my case, I worked in the Congo and in Biosafety Level 4 labs on smallpox.

If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.

The practical case for manned spacef light gets ever-weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation - indeed, as a scientist or practical man, I see little purpose in sending people into space at all. But as a human being, I'm an enthusiast for manned missions.

The U.S. has taken an active role in wars from Libya to the Central African Republic, sent special ops forces into countries from Somalia to South Sudan, conducted airstrikes and abduction missions, even put boots on the ground in countries where it pledged it would not.

Whether it's space tourism or really interesting missions to the moon or Mars, you really need a healthy capital ecosystem to make that happen. Nation states and governments have the control, but unless the financing is sustainable, it's hard to really keep them on that.

Throughout the history of spaceflight and the study of effects of exploring to human, space environment to human body, we have accumulated enough knowledge to be able to move over to the next step: getting ready for interplanetary missions, for interplanetary exploration.

With Liquid Robotics' innovative technology and Boeing's leading intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance solutions, we are helping our customers address maritime challenges in ways that make existing platforms smarter, missions safer, and operations more efficient.

I cycled on a crew assignment as the backup commander on Apollo 16 and would have flown Apollo 19 on a return mission to the moon. However, the last few missions of the Apollo Program were canceled for budgetary reasons. So I lost my second opportunity to land on the moon.

A notorious network of violent Islamist hoodlums, concentrated in the rough-and-tumble district of Molenbeek in Brussels, has been operating in plain sight since the 1990s, planning, plotting and carrying out dozens of elaborate jihadi missions from Afghanistan to Algeria.

We should stop wasting taxpayer funds on ridiculously expensive government missions to nowhere that return little value and blaze no useful trail for others to follow. Of course we should spend much more on science - and yes, use robots to do that science when it makes sense.

United States forces have always relied on local allies to accomplish military and diplomatic missions and will need this support in the future. But why would anyone agree to help the United States if we have a record of breaking our promises and abandoning those who assist us?

One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.

I think the people who experienced the Apollo missions came away from that experience wondering to themselves, 'When can we get a chance to experience spaceflight?' I've heard that many, many times: that people got into a new career field hoping that they would be able to experience spaceflight.

As America knows, Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead. The potential rewards for our country, now that that early choice has led him into the White House, are enormous.

The bottom line is 2018 should finally be the year where we see the early stages of broad-based commercial space tourism appear. Demand will certainly be driven by the early successes or failures of those missions, the marketing of those missions, as well as the propensity for tourists to become repeat flyers.

Los Cabos has been an amalgam of many cultures that have been coming here. There have been beautiful Jesuit missions for example, in many places around this area. The towns are incredible. But there is a very strong Mexicanized culture here that exists because people from different parts of Mexico have come to live here.

Blackwater's work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked. In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house.

When I first went to Hubble, as an astronomer and as a scientist, it was a dream come true. And as an astronaut, the Hubble missions are premiere missions because Hubble is so important to science, so important to humanity, that it's just a very special event. But as an astronomer, it was sort of the holy grail of missions.

I do not have PTSD, but if I watch part of a movie like 'The Hurt Locker,' or when I spend time around Blackhawk helicopters, I will close my eyes that night and live an entire day in Iraq, flying my missions. I remember the smell and the feel and the heat and everything about it. Then I wake up in Illinois, and I'm exhausted.

I actually don't remember Apollo 11 exactly because, at the time, I was five years old. The landing happened at night, and the walk on the moon happened at night eastern time, and I asked my parents; my mom said I was probably asleep, and so I just don't have any recollection. I do have recollection of the later missions to the moon.

Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I biked through the neighborhood, the wind in my hair and a fleet of evildoers on my heels.

The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military's elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road.

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