Congratulations to everyone assembled here today – and those still hard at work even as we speak, keeping the antennas operating – for 40 years of a beautiful relationship.

The Madrid station performance has been outstanding – since its early days supporting the Apollo missions to our recent return to the Moon on the LRO and LCROSS spacecraft. The Madrid station, as part of NASA’s Deep Space Network, has also supported NASA’s human spaceflight missions such as the Space Shuttle, since the 1980’s. It’s also provided the comm for our deep space missions, such as Galileo and Voyager. And you know Voyager is still going since its launch in 1977. Now that’s what I call long distance comm!

I particularly want to mention the excellent project management, engineering and implementation provided by the INTA/INSA team for the Madrid commercial power conversion and the commercial water development. It has made the complex more reliable and environmentally friendly, which is important to all of us.

As you probably have heard by now, NASA’s plans for exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond are currently being studied by the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee – otherwise known as the Augustine Panel. They will be reporting to the White House in August on their recommendations for the U.S. space exploration program, and we are all looking forward to that.

The critical space communications architecture for NASA’s space exploration program will be built on the backbone of the Madrid station and the rest of the Deep Space Network.

Our vision is to build and maintain a scalable, integrated mission support infrastructure that can readily evolve to accommodate new and changing technologies, at the same time providing comprehensive, robust, cost effective, and exponentially higher data rate space communications services to enable all of NASA’s space missions.

This infrastructure shall provide the highest data rates technically feasible and will assure that data comm protocols are internationally interoperable. We will provide anytime-anywhere communication and navigation services for Lunar and Martian human missions.

And while building this infrastructure of the future, we shall continue to meet our commitments to provide space communications and navigation services to existing missions – like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Mars Rovers – and planned missions. This is like converting your 1960’s Mustang into a 2020 hot rod while you are driving it 90 mph down the Autobahn. But we can do it. And the DSN will play a key role.

This station has always been a critical element in NASA’s Deep Space Network and we will continue to depend on Spain for the superb operation of this crucial space infrastructure.