Originally unveiled in 1932, the 60-foot monument was at the time the largest ever dedicated to a living person. With support from early donors, the Foundation arranged for the Monument to be cleaned, repaired and returned to its original state. The beacon atop the pylon was replaced and provides a distinctive night time landmark.

 

The Wright Monument bears this inscription:

IN COMMEMORATION OF THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR BY THE BROTHERS WILBUR AND ORVILLE WRIGHT. CONCEIVED BY GENIUS, AND ACHIEVED BY DAUNTLESS RESOLUTION AND UNCONQUERABLE FAITH.

 

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Wright Brothers Monument Rededication May 2, 1998

The Honorable George Bush Speech

Former Astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin

May 2, 1998
Wright Brothers Monument Rededication
The Honorable George Bush

Thank you all, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you, senator, for that very generous welcome to this historic site. 

I am very, very pleased to be here. Just sitting here like you I've learned a lot. First from Darrell Collins, and then, of course, from my friend Buzz Aldrin, about the importance not just of this place, but the importance of space and the importance of the future of flight. 

I am delighted you have also heard the Navy musicians here. All of it reminds me of things I don't miss from when I was president of the United States and things I do miss. I don't miss the press. This may surprise you. And I don't miss the politics. But I sure miss our military. They are the greatest. And I appreciate that music.  

And that flyby reminded me of two days before the air war started that led to the ground war known as Desert Storm. I invited Tony McPeak, the head of the Air Force (four-star general, commanding the Air Force of the United States), to the White House. He was just back from Saudi Arabia. And I said to him, "Tony, are you as convinced today as you were up at Camp David when you told me what you felt air power could do."

And he said, "Mr. President, I am more convinced than ever." I had had in my mind that some of the smart bombs in Vietnam were not that smart and some of the equipment wasn't quite as advertised, but we decided in Desert Storm that I would do the diplomacy, I would do the politics and then we'd step aside, the mission defined, and let the military fight and win the war. And that's exactly what they did. And those planes, fast and slow, reminded me of those historic achievements.
I'm glad to be here for two obvious reasons. The first and most obvious is joining you in celebrating the Wright brothers and their achievement. The rededication of the Wright Brothers Monument here at the end of the century is a fitting tribute to what they did at the beginning. 

But secondly, it gives me a chance to personally thank the First Flight Society for inducting me into the First Flight shrine back in 1995. To show my thanks I thought I might parachute into this ceremony, but Barbara said, "Read my lips, no more parachute jumps."

History works in mysterious ways. A friend pointed out that at the beginning of the 20th Century, Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to get into a plane, and here toward the end of the century, I was the first one to jump out of one. Countless Americans have served in uniform before me and since. The days I spent flying in the Navy as a young man still mean a great deal to me. It is an understatement to say that my own service days played a major part in shaping my generation and surely affected how I see the world. 

I'm not nearly as articulate as Buzz Aldrin, because his view and scope is so much greater, but it doesn't seem possible that the first stop I made in my training to become a Naval aviator was right here in North Carolina at the Pre-Flight School in Chapel Hill. And then I was flying here in Virginia Beach flying over Manteo coming down on practice bombing runs between here and there. 

At the time it had been 38 years since the first flight here. To be honest, it didn't seem as if the equipment I was flying had come a helluva lot farther than the Wright brothers' equipment. We were flying open Steermans, those Yellow Perils, and then the torpedo bomber and so on.

But don't worry, I'm not going to give you any war stories. I will make an observation though. I know we have some veterans here. I notice the longer I've been away from flying the more heroic I become. It's clear to me that my squadron alone won the war in the Pacific. So, no war stories. Not boring you with that. 

But the bottom line is that experience did help make a man out of a scared 18-year-old kid, and, in the process, it taught me the meaning of duty and sacrifice and loyalty. It was there that I learned to hold sacred the concept of duty, honor and country, and it made me understand that the price of freedom can be high. And it also inculcated in me the importance of aviation as a means of our national defense. 

And later as president I relied on this personal experience when making serious decisions about using air power, about committing our men and women into combat, into harm's way. I knew there are some things it can do and some things it could not. 

Today we've come full circle. Today, together with the First Flight Centennial and the National Park Service, we remember Orville and Wilbur Wright, and we pause to reflect on their contribution to our society when man first slipped the surly bonds of Earth, as it's been put. And at that time on the day 95 years ago, they could not have imagined the countless ways in which their discovery would shape the entire world by the end of what would be known as the American Century. 

I hope this doesn't sound chauvinistic, but it's part of me that doesn't believe flight could have been invented anywhere but in the United States of America. And I think it has to do with the fact that we are the freest country in the world, a place where dreams are realized by hard work, and a fearless belief in the power of ideas. Since our earliest days, we've been a nation of builders and doers whose values of family and justice have sustained us through hard times and prosperity alike. 

It's tough to find a right way to commemorate such an important achievement, but with the fly-overs, the speeches by the gentlemen you've heard from, and the marvelous music, I think you've set the perfect tone here today. 

So thank you for helping preserve this special legacy which is a source of unending inspiration and pride to our whole country. Thank you for letting me be a part of this occasion with you. And isn't it great to live in the freest, most generous, most wonderful country on the face of the Earth. 

Thank you, and may God bless you all.

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May 2, 1998
Wright Brothers Monument Rededication
Former Astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin

President Bush, and all of you here on this beautiful day, thank you for joining together for this event. 

Being a part of this memorial has special meaning for me; because the history of flight is woven through the whole fabric of my life - from my first-year thesis at West Point on the Wright brothers, to F-86 sabre jets in Korea, to Gemini and Apollo. One of my earliest memories is a piece of fabric from the Wright Flyer framed on my father's wall. He was an aide to General Billy Mitchell in the early 20s and was later inspector general of the Thirteenth Air Force in the South Pacific. I took my first ride in an airplane at the age of two, a Lockheed Vega with my father as pilot. The plane belonged to Standard Oil, where he worked during the 30s, and he became prominent as one of the country's first flying executives. It was a shining white plane painted to look like an eagle. And I threw up for most of the ride - a condition happily absent 37 years later, when I rode another Eagle down to the Sea of Tranquillity. 

An interesting irony is that rocket pioneer Robert Goddard was my father's physics professor at Clarke University; and it was Dad, in fact, who years later persuaded Charles Lindbergh to solicit Guggenheim funding for Goddard's rocket experiments in New Mexico. But I guess my earliest connection to flight was in the year 1903, when my mother - whose maiden name was Marion Moon - was born just one month before Flyer I rose off the sand at Kitty Hawk. 

That same year, a Russian schoolteacher named Tsiolkovsky published a book setting forth the basic theory of rocket propulsion. He not only projected the use of rockets for spaceflight but also suggested liquid oxygen, multistaging, an orbital space station, and most of the details of what would become the classic twentieth-century vision of a human presence in space - later conceived independently by both Goddard and Hermann Oberth. 

The final item in that agenda - the orbiting space station - is scheduled for completion in two thousand and three, in the one hundredth birth year - of my mother, Tsiolkovsky's book, and the Wright brothers' flight. 

With that finale to the Paleolithic phase of spaceflight- the last act of the old millennium - we look forward to the Neolithic phase when space will be open not just to governments, scientists, and test-pilots, but to the people of the world. And as the confluence of rocketry and winged flight continues into the new millennium, the two technologies will truly come of age. 

To the people in the year three thousand and three - with cities on the moon, Mars, and beyond - the ancient photo of Flyer I, afloat forever in that frozen moment, will loom across the millennium. And history will remember the inhabitants of our time as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years. That journey is the signature of our century. 

Not that television, computers, and atomic power are lesser achievements, but there's a fundamental allure, a timeless fascination with human flight. In the dawn of the space age, as we ride jetliners larger than the average home, traversing the two-year journey of Lewis and Clark over lunch and a movie, we sometimes forget that the advent of the airplane was even more astonishing than the arrival of the rocket. The crowds of skeptics who came to scoff at the Wright brothers gaped in wonder when their machine suddenly rose from the Earth, carrying with it the longings of millennia. Human flight - the ultimate barrier, the very definition of the impossible - had been achieved. 

The airplane became the promise of the future, and pilots were the popular heroes - the barnstormers, stunt-flyers, and hard-drinking air-mail pilots who steered their routes by water towers and railroad tracks, keeping notes on tall steeples and farms with telephones. 

One of them offered this formula for landing at a fogged-in air field on his route: "When you come to the fork in the road, get up on the left side to miss that silo; after you cross the tracks pull up into the soup, count to thirty, then let down - that way you'll miss the high tension lines; when the highway angles left, take the fourth dirt road and follow it to the ravine - just across the ravine is the airport." The smell of hot oil and simmering aluminum became part of the romance of early air travel - though less, perhaps, for one sitting by an open window behind an airsick passenger. But in the half century following its invention, the airplane gripped the American imagination; aviation became a holy cause, a spiritual quest. 

Even the routine flights of today retain a touch of magic, reminiscent of the Wright brothers' real intent, which was not speed, money, or military might but simply to break the bonds of Earth and see the world in a new way.

There's a feeling of transcendence in the overview effect - the distancing that allows one to see the larger whole. Viewed from great heights, objects blend together in strange textures and configurations, with unexpected beauty. Flight gives us new perspectives on our everyday lives, new insights into ourselves. 

In space, the effect becomes exponential. What might the Wright brothers have felt had they been with me on Gemini 12, with the radiant arc of Earth floating below them like a great mothership? The soft, glowing presence of planet Earth in the black abyss had a pristine clarity uncaptured by photographs. 

Images on film lack the subtle shades, the brightness, and the depth of the living sphere, which bulged out of the blackness as I sailed outward on Apollo 11 three years later. From the deep blue of the Mediterranean, all of Europe and Africa sprawled away in soft pastels, innocent of political boundaries. And from the surface of the moon, where I could cover with my thumb the site of all human history, the Earth seemed fragile as a Christmas ornament, drifting like a lost balloon on the black velvet of space. 

The image of a living Earth, capable of extinction, disarms illusions of individual or tribal isolation. We gained more than altitude in those 66 years from Kitty Hawk to the moon. Seeing Earth not as an extension of man, but man as an extension of Earth, we come of age in the cosmos. 

But one is struck by the fact that the time from Sputnik to the present is equivalent to the years between Flyer I and the 747. Where, we ask, are the spaceliners? A promising move in that direction is a space tourist program being initiated by my ShareSpace Foundation, which will match each ticket sold to the wealthy with passage for an application selected at random. The view from space will deprovincialize our perspective and rekindle the capacity for wonder. 

We are alive at the dawn of a new Renaissance, a moment much like the morning of the modern age when most of the globe lay deep in mystery, when tall masts pierced the skies of burgeoning ports, luring those of imagination to seek their own destiny, to challenge the very foundations of man and nature, heaven and earth. Like the sailing ships that incarnated the aura of the Renaissance, or the great steam locomotives that embodied the building of America, the frail Flyer on the shores of Kitty Hawk is an emblem of the human spirit. Its progeny will take us to the stars. 

I began these remarks with some synchronistic events. I'd like to leave you with one more. Almost 400 years before the Wright brothers flew, a man named Verrazzano became the first explorer to set foot on what would become the nascent United States. Sailing up the east coast, he mistook an outer bank of land for an isthmus dividing the Atlantic and the Pacific. 

The resulting map, though soon discredited, launched the quest for a Northwest Passage that inspired voyages of discovery for another century. 

And where, along that presumed isthmus, did Verrazzano walk ashore? 

Kitty Hawk. At Kill Devil Hill.

The point of arrival becomes the point of departure. Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight, like the Wright brothers' vision, is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great opening out of mind and spirit in the age of Verrazzano. 

This was the promise of Kitty Hawk: That from the moment of the first flight, the heavens would become the final canvas for expressing in bold strokes the inexhaustible soul of humanity.

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