Bill Nelson

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, hurricanes can be deadly. We are accustomed to them in Florida. They are part of our lifestyle. We know enough about hurricanes and the ferociousness and strength of Mother Nature to know that when a hurricane starts bearing down, you better be prepared, and that is especially so with regard to boats. Hurricanes cause giant-sized waves and strong winds that make it impossible to navigate a boat. So when the forecast calls for a hurricane, boats ought to get out of the way. Sadly, last year the El Faro, a cargo vessel that sailed from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico and back, along with its sister ship, sailed right into a hurricane off the Bahamas. As a result, the last call to shore, although the captain's voice was calm, was to report that they had lost power and were therefore listing, which meant that something had been breached and water was coming into the ship. That was the last we heard from the captain. We now know that that ship is 5 miles below the surface of the Atlantic, on the eastern side of the Bahama Islands. Thirty-three people lost their lives, most of whom were from the Jacksonville, FL, area. The National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation, and the question is whether or not they are going to put down another U.S. Navy submersible so they can continue their search for the recorder that would give them the complete data from the ship. I am bringing this up again because the very same thing almost happened yesterday, only this time a 4,000-passenger cruise ship, sailing from the New York area to Port Canaveral, FL, and then on to other destinations in the Caribbean, sailed right into a hurricane that had winds topping 100 miles per hour. I wish I had a blowup of the image of these hurricanes to show the Senate. Yesterday's storm was right off the coast of North and South Carolina. When these two images are compared side by side, we can see how yesterday's storm is similar to Hurricane Isabel. They look menacingly similar. The thing about yesterday's storm is that it was forecasted for days. So why in the world would a cruise ship with thousands of passengers on it go sailing right into it? Some of the passengers have made comments, including Robert Huschka, executive editor of the Detroit Free Press, who was a passenger on the cruise. He said: ``I am not going to lie. It was truly terrifying.'' Passengers talked about how the water was coming into the upper decks. The pictures that were taken by the passengers on the ship speak for themselves. I am sure there was a courageous crew on board, but the question is: Why, after what happened to the El Faro last year, did it sail into the storm? Even if they were surprised by the change of the direction of the storm, which is what happened with the hurricane last year, why in the world would a ship go anywhere close to where the hurricane could be, particularly as the storm starts to cross the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, and, therefore, gets all the more fuel for the counterclockwise rotation of the winds from the warm water? I want the National Transportation Safety Board, over which the Senate Commerce Committee has some jurisdiction--of which I have the privilege of being the ranking member--to come up with a quick report. Now, thank goodness, that so far only four passengers were reported injured and no one was killed. That ship is now returning to port back in the New York area. Thank goodness there was not much damage, and that it is seaworthy. But the question is, When there is a storm brewing, why are mistakes made just like what happened to the El Faro? Before it left the Port of Jacksonville, they knew that a hurricane was coming. We need to know what happened in this case as well so we can prevent these kinds of accidents that could be so tragic in the future. The Senate Commerce Committee has oversight of the National Transportation Safety Board, and I want them to come up with answers very quickly and make an admonition to Americans that when a storm is brewing, you don't go out of port. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I want to chronicle for the Senate and to make a part of the Congressional Record that nearly 5,000 people gathered this morning for the annual National Prayer Breakfast with the President, members of the Cabinet, members of the Joint Chiefs, most of the Diplomatic Corps, and a lot of the Members of Congress. The national breakfast is sponsored by the Senate prayer group that meets on Wednesday morning and the House prayer group that meets on Thursday morning. This year it was the House's turn to be the cochairs. We do have cochairs in the House and the Senate prayer group, one from each party. In the case of the Senate prayer group, we were ably represented, as they spoke from the podium, by Senator Boozman of Arkansas and Senator Kaine of Virginia. They will be the cochairmen of the breakfast next year. It was the eighth time that President Obama has spoken. This Senator feels it was the best speech at the Prayer Breakfast I have heard President Obama give. It was one of the best speeches that this Senator, after attending Prayer Breakfasts for over three decades, has ever heard. He quoted the Scriptures from the writings of Paul which say that our faith can keep us from fear. The President illustrated that throughout so much of his remarks. During his closing remarks, he told a story that he had heard a week or so ago, and I wish to share that story here on the Senate floor. It was about a U.S. Army sergeant whose entire unit had been captured by the Nazis during World War II. While he was in the POW camp, a Nazi colonel told the sergeant, who was the senior official: I want the names of the Jewish soldiers in this unit, and I want them to report to me. The sergeant refused. The Nazi colonel then decided to assemble all 200 of the sergeant's troops in the POW camp in formation, with the sergeant at the head of the formation. As the colonel approached him again, obviously trying to single out and take and probably try to annihilate the Jewish-American soldiers, he again said, as all the troops were standing there in formation: Sergeant, I want to know who the Jews are. The sergeant replied: Sir, we are all Jews. The colonel then took his pistol out of the holster, cocked it, and put it to the head of the sergeant and made the same demand again. The faith of that Christian sergeant overcame his fear for he was looking out for his troops, and he repeated again: Sir, we are all Jews. The Nazis backed down in that POW camp. The Jewish soldiers were not revealed and, therefore, protected. That was just one of the many stories that were recounted as the President gave what was an extraordinary conclusion for his last National Prayer Breakfast as President. It is an occasion that so many of us join in on every Wednesday here as we come together and put aside our partisan, regional and any other differences that we have and are unified and joined in prayer. So I thought it fitting, the National Prayer Breakfast having just concluded, that I share this story with the Senate. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, we have had quite a running story about the maker of inflatable airbags, which are usually in the steering wheel of an automobile and also over on the passenger side. These airbags have saved countless lives. Yet what we have found is that a manufacturer named Takata from Japan has consistently had different airbags under recall. Well, we just found out yesterday that another one of the automobile manufacturers that uses Takata airbags has now had a further recall just yesterday with 2.2 million of their vehicles. Why? Because of defective airbags. These bags are supposed to save lives, not harm and kill lives. Yet I remember the lady in Orlando who had a minor fender-bender collision in an intersection, and her air bag deployed. When the police got there, they thought there was a homicide. Her neck was lacerated, and she bled to death. There is a fireman, also near Orlando, who will never be a fireman again because he lost his right eye after the explosion of the air bag. The airbag is defectively manufactured and explodes with such force that the air bag becomes a hand grenade which explodes, and pieces of shrapnel fly into the face of the driver or the passenger. In the case of the lady in Orlando, her jugular was slashed and she was killed. We have seen a score of these deaths around the country. There was recently another one from a defective Takata airbag in South Carolina. There are now well over 20 million vehicles that have been recalled. I will be talking to the head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and will be asking all of these questions about safety, such as this: Why are we having the drip, drip, drip of recalls here and recalls there? Why isn't this agency taking an aggressive approach and going after all of these inflaters? It is expected that it is the explosive compound ammonium nitrate that becomes extremely explosive when exposed to humidity and causes the metal to shred and, therefore, go right into the very driver or the passenger it was intended to save. This is a matter of grave concern, and now the latest news is that Honda has recalled over 2 million more vehicles nationwide. There have been over 20 million vehicles that have been recalled worldwide. We have to get to the bottom of this and get those defective airbags out of the steering wheels of those cars and replace them with safe airbags. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I have raced to the floor simply because it has come to my attention that there are some Senators who are utilizing this Energy bill, which is for a very valued purpose, a purpose of energy efficiency. Some Senators are utilizing this legislation for their own purpose by proposing amendments that will ultimately threaten the environmental integrity off of Florida's gulf coast and will threaten the U.S. military and its ability to maintain the largest testing and training area for not only the United States but for the world. I want to refer to a map of the Gulf of Mexico and show you everything. Here is the tip of Florida. This is Pensacola, Naples, Tampa, and down here are the Florida Keys and Key West. Everything in yellow in the Gulf of Mexico--and this is the law--is off-limits to drilling until 2022. It happens to be a bipartisan law that was passed back in 2006. It was cosponsored by my then-fellow Senator from Florida, a Republican, Mel Martinez. Why did the two of us make this a law? The drilling is over here, everything to the west. The first question is: Where is the oil? Mother Nature decided to have the sediments go down the Mississippi River for millions of years where it compacted into the Earth's crust and became oil. The oil deposits are off of Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, and there is a little bit off of Mississippi. There really isn't much oil out here. In addition, why did we want this area kept from drilling? Take a look at that. That is a marsh in Louisiana after the gulf oilspill which took place several years ago. We certainly don't want this in Florida. You will notice that there are not many beaches off of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. But what do you think Florida is known for? It is known for its pristine beaches all the way from the Perdido River, which is along the Florida-Alabama line and goes down the coast to Naples. This area not only includes the Keys, but it goes up the east coast of Florida. Florida has more beaches than any other State. Florida has more coastline than any other State, save for Alaska, and Alaska doesn't have a lot of beaches. People not only visit Florida because of Mickey Mouse, but they visit Florida in large part because of our beaches. The gulf oilspill turned these white, sugary sands of Pensacola Beach black. Even though the oil spilled way over here, it drifted to the east and got as far as Pensacola. A little bit more oil reached Destin, and there were just a few tar balls on Panama City's beach. When Americans saw those white, sugary sand beaches black from oil, they assumed that had happened to the entire coast of Florida, and as a result people didn't visit for one whole season. So what happened to Florida's economy? What happened to the dry cleaners, restaurants, and hotels that are all too happy to welcome their guests and visitors who didn't come? You get the picture of what happened to our economy. I am speaking about this as the Senator from Florida, but now let me speak as the Senator who is the second-ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. This area is known as the military mission line. Everything east of that line--indeed, almost all of the Gulf of Mexico--is the largest training and testing area for the U.S. military in the world. Why do you think the training for the F-22 is at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City? Why do you think the training for the F- 35 Joint Strike Fighter, both foreign pilots as well as our own, is at Eglin Air Force Base? It is because they have this area. Why is the U.S. Air Force training, testing, and evaluation headquarters at Fort Walton, Eglin Air Force Base? Because they have 300 miles here where they can test some of our most sophisticated weapons. If you talk to any admiral or general, they will tell you that you cannot have oil-related activities when they are testing some of their most sophisticated weapons. This is a national asset, and it is key to our national defense. So for all of those reasons, Senator Martinez and I put in law that this is off-limits up until the year 2022, but now comes the Energy bill, with its sneaky amendments giving additional revenue sharing to these States and upper States on the Atlantic seaboard. It gives those States a financial incentive to get a cut of the oil revenue. What do you think that is going to do to the government of the State of Florida in the future as an excuse to put drilling out here as well as to have drilling off the east coast of Florida? When I was a young Congressman, I faced two Secretaries of the Interior who were absolutely intent that they were going to drill on the east coast of the United States from Cape Hatteras, NC, all the way south to Fort Pierce, FL, and the only way back then--in the early and mid-1980s--we were able to get that stopped, which this young Congressman had a hand in doing, was to explain that you can't have oil rigs off of Cape Canaveral, where we are dropping the first stages of all of our military rockets that are so essential for us so that we will have assured access into space in order to protect ourselves with all of those assets. Of course, in the early 1980s, I could talk about what was going to happen for 135 flights of the space shuttle. You can't have oil-related activities where the first stages--the solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle--are going to be landing by parachutes in the ocean because you are going to threaten the launch facilities for the U.S. military as well as NASA if you put oil-related activities out there. So, too, in another 2 years we will be launching humans again on American rockets, some of whose first stages will still be crashing into the Atlantic and whose military defense payloads continue to launch almost every month, and those first stages splash down into the Atlantic. Yet an amendment that is suspected to be offered by a Senator is going to give incentive in the future--all the more pressure to try to pull oil out of here. Ever since this Senator was a young Congressman, I have been carrying this battle. This Senator supports oil drilling. This Senator supports it where it is environmentally sound, including fracking in shale rock, because look what it has done for us. But there are times when there is tradeoff. But in this case there is not going to be a tradeoff, in the first place because there is not any oil, in the second place because it would wreck the economy of Florida with our tourism and our sugary white beaches, but in the third place because it would threaten the national security of this country if we eliminated this as our largest test evaluation and training center. I can tell my colleagues that this Senator is not going to let that happen. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I wish to address an issue that the Senator from Alabama touched on before he leaves the floor. I am here to speak about the Florida Everglades, but since the Senator just raised the issue of the Gulf of Mexico, which is certainly an interest of his, just as it is for the Acting President pro tempore, the Senator from Louisiana, I just want to clarify something and make sure the Senators understand that this part of the Gulf of Mexico, which is off- limits to drilling up to and through 2022, has nothing to do with the Obama administration. It has to do with a law that Senator Martinez and I passed in the last half of the last decade. Now, why did we do that? Well, it would be nice to say that we were prescient and understood that when the oil spilled into the gulf off of Louisiana--relative to the whole spill, a little oil got into Florida and covered up Pensacola Beach and got into Perdido Bay, Pensacola Bay, Choctawhatchee Bay and went as far east as Panama City Beach; the sugary white beaches that so many people visit were just covered with tar balls--as a result, a whole tourist season was lost, not just for Pensacola, Destin, Sandestin, and Panama City Beach but for the entire gulf coast of Florida down to Clearwater Beach, Sarasota, Fort Myers, Naples and for the farmost beaches on the west coast of Florida on the gulf and Marco Island. Now, if that were not enough, I just want the Senator to understand why we are so opposed to drilling off the coast of Florida. Clearly, there is the economic reason. So much of the environment got messed up, and it was unhealthy for the critters that get into the estuaries. Here is the ringer, and the Senator from Alabama will especially appreciate this because he has, at times, been my leader on the Armed Services Committee. The Gulf of Mexico off of Florida is the largest testing and training range in the world for the U.S. military, and every admiral, general, and the Secretaries of all of the branches will simply tell you that we cannot have drilling activities where we are testing and training some of our most sophisticated weapons. Why do we have all of those training, tests, and evaluation activities at Eglin Air Force Base, Tyndall Air Force Base, and the Naval Training Center in Panama City? I didn't even include Pensacola and Whiting Field and all of the Department of Defense. When we shut down the U.S. Navy's testing range of Vieques, off of Puerto Rico, where did the fleet of the U.S. Navy go? They went to the gulf. They will send squadrons coming down to Key West Naval Air Station and stay there for a week or two because when they lift off the runway of Boca Chica, within 2 minutes, they are over a protected area so they can get into their training and testing activities. I will finally say to my friend--and I am not sure that my colleague has ever been able to see this through the eyes of someone who is trying to protect the defense assets in the State of Florida----

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I will yield to the Senator for a question.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I thank the Senator. He knows how affectionate I am toward him as a friend. I appreciate that friendship and that willingness in a bipartisan way--even when we had all kinds of thorny issues, such as national missile defense in the Armed Services Committee--that the two of us could work it out. Florida Everglades Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about the Everglades, and I need to start by saying that the Army Corps of Engineers began releasing water from Lake Okeechobee into the two rivers on either side of the lake. The problem is that we have a dike--not like the one that Mother Nature intended, where the whole surrounding of Lake Okeechobee, which is the largest lake in Florida, was nothing but a marsh. That is how Mother Nature had it. But after people moved in--and then in the late 1920s, the hurricane that drowned 2,000 people--we came in there and diked all the way around it. Well, the dike is only so structurally sound so that as the water rises in the lake, there is more water pressure on the sides, and if you start getting above 15 feet of depth of the lake, we have to worry about the dike collapsing and all the flooding of the surrounding towns and people and farmlands. So you get the picture. So the Army Corps of Engineers has to give some relief. So they release water to the east into the St. Lucie River and to the west into the Caloosahatchee River, and as a result, it relieves the dike pressure problem. But since Lake Okeechobee is so polluted, until we can get it cleaned up--and there is an effort--what happens when it goes into these pristine estuaries to the east into the St. Lucie and to the west into the Caloosahatchee, is that you get much too much nutrient content into those estuaries. The salinity in those estuaries goes down, which is harmful to things like oysters and certain fish, and the nitrogen and phosphorous and other pollutants come up. And what happens? Algae grows. When algae grows, it sucks up the oxygen from the water, and it becomes a dead river. The mullet can't jump because there is no mullet, the fish hawk can't dive because there is no fish, and it becomes a dead river. Now, that is why it is so necessary that we proceed with the Everglades restoration projects that will help us clean up the pollution in Lake Okeechobee, and at the same time when the dike structure gets threatened, we will have a place to send that water instead of directly into those two estuaries. That is presently being built on the east--a storage area--and it is to be built on the west over near LaBelle on the Caloosahatchee River. Well, it is just another reason why many of us are fighting so hard to complete these Everglades restoration projects, so that impossible decisions that face the Corps of Engineers right now--that either they threaten the dam and hold it back or they release the polluted water and kill the rivers--are not choices that the Corps has to make. It is certainly not a good choice for our environment and for all the people who live in the surrounding area. So Everglades restoration must move forward aggressively and without delay, and that is why this Senator is going to be introducing legislation tomorrow to expedite that process. It is going to be called the Everglades for the Next Generation Act. It will authorize all of these Everglades restoration projects that the Army Corps of Engineers has deemed ready to begin. It would allow the Corps to begin work on them immediately instead of having to wait around for us to pass another water bill. Remember, we just passed a water bill. When was the last time we passed a water bill? It was 7 years ago. We just can't wait that long. There is too much at stake, and this is why we want to get these all bundled up, so the Army Corps of Engineers can proceed. The Everglades, for the first three-quarters of the last century, was diked, drained, and deferred, and now we are trying to bring back as much of that plumbing and reverse it so that it will flow much more like Mother Nature had intended it and did for eons and eons. It is a monumental task. We have to look at what we are doing to protect this land that we love that has been called the ``river of grass.'' We have to do everything we can to protect it. But right now, beware. The National Park Service has in front of it and is evaluating a proposal from a Texas-based company for drilling and fracking activity. This company is looking to conduct--this is what they say: Oh, this is just a seismic survey--first on 70,000 acres, but it is just the first part of seismically mapping the entire Big Cypress National Preserve. This is a national preserve of 700,000 acres, and where is it located? It is located right next to the Everglades National Park, which is 1.5 million acres, but it includes hundreds of thousands of other acres that are part of this water discharge area where we are cleaning up that water as it is coming south. They will say: Oh, this is just a seismic survey. But what do we have seismic surveys for? To drill. By the way, this is a company in Texas that not only drills for oil, it also fracks for oil. Why in the world would we want this to happen? Why would we spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars to restore the Everglades and then suddenly turn around and hand it off to a Texas wildcatter to go out there and drill--a wildcatter that is also a fracker. This Senator has nothing against fracking. Where is our fracking done? It is done in the hard shale rock of the Dakotas, of Oklahoma, of Texas. They go down under high pressure and shoot water and chemicals to break up the shale rock. It is solid rock. What does the State of Florida sit on? It sits on a porous honeycomb of limestone, and that porous rock is filled with freshwater near the surface. So people wanted to go in there and start doing high-pressure fracking that we do successfully to shale rock, which was done by the Dan Hughes Company. They were given a permit by the State of Florida. Then the county commission of Collier County found out about it and started raising Cain, and suddenly the pressure became too great because of what that fracking would do, with the high-speed chemical going into that porous limestone, not only to the water supply of Florida but to the very foundation of Florida. If you ever look and envision a piece of coral that our divers go down to look for in some of the national reefs--we have seen that beautiful coral, and it builds up. That is very similar to how Florida was formed: Over years, over and over, those corals and shells and skeletons and limestone that created that substructure holds up the State of Florida and contains a bubble of water, which is our Floridian aquifer. Some people think a seismic survey is no big deal, but watch out. It is just like the proverbial camel getting its nose under the tent. Watch out. That camel is pretty soon going to be in the tent. So why conduct a huge, prolonged seismic survey if we don't have the plans to extract the resources that are found? Why would the Federal Government approve risky behavior such as fracking and a brandnew type of seismic survey equipment in an area we have spent decades trying to restore? Remember, I said it is the Everglades National Park, 1.5 million acres. Right next to it, to the west, is the Big Cypress National Preserve, another 700,000 acres. To the north are all of those protected lands of the water recharge area, hundreds of thousands of acres. All of this is why I wrote to the Interior Secretary asking her agency to complete a very thorough environmental review of this proposal. It is interesting. I wasn't the only one who responded. The National Park Service told me they had received about 8,000 comments during the public comment period. It seems to me that is a pretty clear sign that there is a great deal of concern and controversy out there in the public interest and especially those in Collier County. My colleagues can't imagine the political backlash when this Dan Hughes oil company--not the one that is applying for the seismic survey but they were a wildcatter as well as a fracker, that Dan Hughes company--my colleagues can't imagine the political backlash that occurred from people of both parties. I can tell my colleagues there was backlash, especially from the Republican county commission in Collier County, when they found out there was fracking going on out there without their knowing about it and without any of their input into whether it should have been done. Fortunately, the outcry was so severe that the State of Florida finally revoked the permit and they had to pull out. They had--that company--performed an unauthorized acid stimulation procedure, which is a glorified term for fracking. So we rose up and we fought that. Again, I say to the Senate, this Senator does not have a problem with fracking done environmentally well, but fracking in all of our oil reserves has been done in the shale rock. That is what has made it possible to, in a few years, be able to completely eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. This Senator has no problem with that. This Senator is thankful for that, but when we try to perform that procedure on a different kind of substrate--a porous limestone filled with water--then we are courting economical and environmental disaster. I must say, this didn't stop some in the State Legislature of Florida who are determined to open parts of Florida to companies looking to drill. To make sure all of this local opposition doesn't get in their way, State legislators in session right now in Tallahassee have proposed a bill that would prohibit a county, a city or any other local government from limiting fracking within that city or county's borders. Such a decision, under this proposed legislation, would be left up to the State only. It is not hard to figure out how that is going to turn out, especially since it was the State of Florida that gave a permit to do the fracking that there was such a reaction to 2 years ago. This is one of the most pristine areas on the planet. I urge my colleagues to join our efforts to protect this unique environment for generations to come. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be able to display for the Senate a model of the space shuttle.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be granted as much time as I might consume.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, 30 years ago today, it was very cold in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center. Both pads had been readied for the first time--a space shuttle on 39A and 39B--since the Space Shuttle Columbia, which was the 24th flight, was so late getting off the ground--indeed, for the better part of the month, from the first start and four scrubs starting December 19 but finally launching after the fifth try into a flawless 6-day mission on January 12, to return to Earth on January 18. In the meantime, on the other space shuttle launch pad, Challenger--the 25th flight--is being readied. The night before the day of the launch, which is 30 years ago today, it was exceptionally cold in Florida. It got down to 25 degrees. Indeed, there were actually icicles hanging on the launch tower. As the crew arrived in the early morning hours--and there were holds all the way up until a little bit past 11 o'clock. At this point, the temperature had improved to 36 degrees. The icicles were still there, but it was above freezing. There was considerable consternation throughout the entire apparatus of NASA and its contractors-- particularly the top managers, as well as the managers of the company that made the solid rocket boosters--as to whether there should be a launch, and the go was given. Seventy-three seconds high into the sky above Florida, Challenger disintegrated. To a nation that had come to think that climbing in the space shuttle was like getting in your car and taking a Sunday afternoon drive, indeed this was quite a shock because the entire technological prowess of the country 30 years ago was summed up in this magnificent flying machine that would go to orbit and would come back and would take 45,000 pounds of payload to orbit and would come back and land like an airplane, albeit without an engine. But that morning, it was to be different. The only other astronauts we had lost were in getting ready for the Apollo program to go to the Moon. On the pad, in just a countdown test of the Apollo capsule--and the environment was an oxygen-rich environment. One of the three astronauts doing the practice countdown happened to kick a part of the spacecraft that had a wire that set an ignition, and in that oxygen-enriched environment, fire engulfed and claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee. All those years when we did not even know what was going to happen when we went into space--when we launched John Glenn on that Atlas rocket that we knew had a 20-percent chance of failure--we didn't know enough about the human body in zero gravity and at those speeds to know what was going to happen to the human body. In all those years of experimentation and going to the Moon many times--even on the ill-fated Apollo 13 where we thought we had three dead men in the Apollo capsule when that explosion occurred en route to the Moon, and yet miraculously this space industry and NASA apparatus came together and figured out real-time how to get them back and get them back safely, a crew headed by Jim Lovell. But it was not to be on the morning of January 28, 1986. I have a scale model of 1 to 100 of the space shuttle, and I want to explain what happened that morning. As Challenger launched, it went through its sequence where they had to throttle back on the main engines as they went through part of the atmosphere getting maximum dynamic pressure, and then those famous words that came back from the crew that they were acknowledging: Go at throttle up. The three main engines ignited a burning in the tail of the space shuttle, fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen contained in the external fuel tank. They throttled up to 100 percent, and it was straight up and accelerating. Here is what happened at 73 seconds. The solid rocket boosters are attached by struts to the external tank, which does not hold their fuel. Their fuel is a solid fuel. It has the consistency of the eraser on this pencil. Those ignite at T minus zero, each with about 3 million pounds of thrust. You definitely know you are going somewhere. But the cold weather had dealt us a devil's brew that day. These joints where they put together the solid rocket booster are sealed with a rubberized gasket, and those rubber O-rings, because of the cold weather, had gotten stiff and brittle to the point at which it just so happened that at a point close to the external tank, the hot gases of thrust, instead of coming out the nozzle in the tail of the solid rocket booster, are coming out because the joint is not sealed because of that rubberized O-ring that has now become stiff and brittle from the cold weather, and the hot gases burned into the external tank, and that caused the explosion that all of us remember. That was played over and over on our television screens. That was what was such a shock to the American people. Those seven souls--led by Dick Scobee as the mission commander, a test pilot; and by Mike Smith, the pilot in NASA terminology, the copilot, a test pilot; Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher from New Hampshire; Greg Jarvis, a payload specialist; Judy Resnik, a mission specialist; Ron McNair, a mission specialist; and Ellison Onizuka, a mission specialist--those seven souls perished as all of the explosion fell miles and miles down to the surface waters of the ocean and eventually the debris on the floor of the ocean. There is a dramatic presentation at the Kennedy Space Center in the Atlantis exhibit showing a part of the Challenger, and I would urge anybody who goes to the Kennedy Space Center to go and see that. It is a very moving exhibit. It is an exhibit about the crew. That exhibit is not only about the Challenger, which was 30 years ago, that exhibit is about the next space shuttle that we lost. That was some 16, 17 years later, and it was on February 1, 2003. It was the Space Shuttle Columbia, the one that had launched just previous to the Challenger and the one on which this Senator was privileged to be a part of the crew, but this time it was destroyed for a different reason. It had launched a couple of weeks earlier and everything was fine, or so we thought, but it was not to be. During the launch, the external fuel tank that was carrying the very cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen--in order to keep that cold, it is surrounded with insulation--had part of its insulation break off. It is about the size of an insulated Styrofoam tub. It is about this big, and that small piece of insulation broke off right here as Columbia was on ascent. As it accelerated and the speeds became very high, that piece of foam fell with high velocity right at the leading edge of the left wing. That is a carbon-carbon fiber very light in weight but very resistant to heat. Upon reentry, the front engines of the wing and the tip of the nose, all carbon-carbon fiber, get up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course everything was fine at that moment, even though there was a hole in the left leading edge of the wing during Columbia's 8\1/2\-minute ascent into orbit. When it was time to go home on February 1, this crew of seven was about to meet their fate. As they were doing their deorbit burn, falling through space for half an hour and encountering the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the hot gases got in the leading edge of the wing--the orbiter had separated and was flying more like an airplane on descent--and heated it up, causing Columbia to burn up upon reentry. As a result, debris fell for miles and miles high over Texas. Rick Husband, the commander; Willie McCool, the pilot; Mike Anderson, payload commander; David Brown, mission specialist; Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Laurel Clark, mission specialist; and Ilan Ramon, payload specialist. As the test pilot and hero of the Israeli Air Force that led the strike on Saddam Hussein's nuclear plant outside of Baghdad, Ilan Ramon had been chosen to fly on the space shuttle. I remember when I met with the former President of Israel, Shimon Peres, the day before the reentry. He knew of my background, and he said: I want you to see this telecommunication that I got from Ilan Ramon. It said: Mr. President, on behalf of the Israeli people, I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity. The fact that you and then President Clinton have enabled me to be able to start in this astronaut program and fly in this mission is just incredible. President Peres shared how that was so meaningful to him only a few hours before Columbia did its deorbit burn and went into the pages of history. So it is with a heavy heart that I come to the Senate floor on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy to pay tribute to the Challenger crew and also to the Columbia crew. It is solemn, but what they and the Apollo 1 astronauts sacrificed--and what so many other astronauts in training have sacrificed through training mishaps--is not forgotten and it is not in vain because we are going to Mars. It is not going to look like this because we learned our lesson. This was a fantastic flying machine, but it was an inherently risky design because the crew in the orbiter is on the same side as the stack of explosives, which resulted in two terrible tragedies that occurred. The new American rockets that will fly in September of 2017--in less than 2 years--to and from the International Space Station look like they have gone back to the old Apollo design, but, in fact, the new rockets have updated crew compartments in the spacecraft that will sit on the top of the rocket so that in the event of an explosion, even on the pad or all the way into orbit, you can save the lives of the crew by detaching the explosive rockets from the spacecraft and getting them safely away from the explosion. It will save the crew either by landing under its own power or having parachutes that will let it down gently. The fact is that by our nature we are explorers and adventurers, and we never want to give that up. It is a part of our DNA, it is a part of our character, and it is a part of our vision. We used to go westward as we developed this country into that new frontier. Now we will continue to go upward. We are going to Mars in the 2030s, and that is going to be a great day in that decade. You will see us build on that in 2 years. Americans will have launches on new spacecrafts which will be on the top of rockets and in 3 years a full-up test of the largest rocket ever put together by mankind on the face of this planet, the space launch system and its spacecraft, Orion. It will have its first up test flight in 2018. So in the memory of the Challenger crew, the Columbia crew, and the Apollo 1 crew, we stand on their shoulders as we continue to explore the heavens. We thank them for their courage, their sacrifice, and their pioneering spirit. That is what I wanted to share on this 30th anniversary of the tragedy of the Space Shuttle Challenger. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for yesterday's vote to confirm the nomination of John Michael Vazquez of New Jersey to be U.S. district judge for the District of New Jersey. I would have voted yea. Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for today's votes on Senator Markey's amendment, No. 2982, and Senator Crapo's amendment, No. 3021, to the Energy Policy Modernization Act, S. 2012. I would have voted yea on both of these amendments.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, have you ever flown a drone? It used to be that you had to fly helicopters or it used to be that you would fly what we call unmanned aerial vehicles, the ones that have been so helpful to us in the war against terror. That would usually be an Air Force pilot. But now people can go to Best Buy or to Walgreens or to the hobby shop and buy a drone this big. If it is an older model, it would cost $100. If it is a newer model, it would cost $500. People can have a lot of fun. As a matter of fact, I can't wait until they finish development of the drones they are testing right now that I can sit on, and then I can go from point A to point B and avoid the red lights and the traffic jams and so forth. Along with this new technology comes some, certainly, new challenges. So as our commerce committee is approaching work on the FAA bill, the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization--otherwise, in a couple of months that authorization law expires--we are going to have to address the issue of drones because we have had now a number of near misses of drones. A study in December came out: 241 near misses. As a matter of fact, the New York area airports clearly had the most with, in this study period, 86, but my State of Florida had both Miami and Orlando with a substantial number. At most of the major metropolitan area airports across the entire country--Los Angeles, 39 near misses, and Chicago and Boston; we can go over the entire country--there is a substantial number. Another report that came out just at the end of last year pointed out that just in September there were 122 incidents and just in October there were 137 incidents. If a seagull sucked into the jet engines of US Airways could cause the complete loss of power so that Captain Sully Sullenberger--since he couldn't get to an emergency landing in a field--had to put it down in the Hudson River, and if a seagull with flesh and blood and seagull bones and webbed feet sucked into the engines can stall out a jet engine, we can imagine what a drone that you buy at Best Buy this big made of plastic, but with metal parts such as the camera, what that would do, and it is just a matter of time, unless we take action. Now, I have a picture here. I would like to zero-in on this. This is a drone, the size that I just showed with my arms, flying past a palm tree in my State of Florida. But if that drone goes higher--higher than the FAA limit right now of 400 feet--and gets into the flightpath of an incoming airliner or one that is outbound, then we have a major disaster on our hands. We want creativity. We want inventiveness. This is a new technology and it is great. Look at what we can do now with aerial photography so we don't have to rent an airplane. Look, however, how it is being used. Did my colleagues know drones are being used to go over a prison wall and deliver contraband? How about the reverse: Getting messages out? So, obviously, the government is going to have to get into it one way or another. Now, one thing that we could do with this technology is we could require the software to be put in these drones that would prohibit it from getting close to an airport. There is that kind of technology. I suppose we could put the software in it that would prohibit it from getting above a certain altitude. But the question is this: When somebody breaks those limits, how do we go about identifying them? Should there be some kind of registration number? Should there, in fact, even be licensure? We probably don't have to worry about commercial uses such as aerial photography because those users are going to be very careful. However, for the hobbyist or the kid who can now go and purchase a drone, we see the probabilities of an accident waiting to happen. Now, I don't have the answer. But in the next two months, as we are getting ready on the FAA bill, we are going to have to come up with some answers. So I raise this issue for the Senate. It is a real problem. We have to face it. We have to address it. We have to prevent these kinds of terrible accidents that can occur if we do nothing. I intend to do something on the commerce committee. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President and my fellow Senators, I just want to point out what the Senator has already brought up and underscore that the fact is that the plutonium reactor in Arak has now been filled with concrete. The fact is that 12 tons--or 24,000 pounds--of enriched uranium has been shipped out of Arak to another destination, mostly to Russia. Before the agreement, it would only take 3 months to build a nuclear weapon. Now, it would take at least 12 months. So we would have a 1- year advance notice in order to determine what we needed to do to deter Iran. May I say it is irritating that we are going to continue to deal with an Iran that is going to do things that are going to provoke us. And they have certainly done this in the Strait of Hormuz just a few days ago, doing a live-fire exercise while we have the aircraft carrier battle group going through the Strait of Hormuz--not even 29 miles wide. That is a provocation. There is the provocation of shooting off two missile tests, which is a violation of U.N. sanctions. I hope the President will follow through and sanction them for that, regardless of their protests that say: Oh well, then, you are violating our nuclear agreement. No, it is a nuclear agreement. They have now stretched the time to 12 months before, if they decided today that they wanted to build a nuclear weapon. That was the whole purpose of the nuclear negotiations in the first place--to take off the table that Iran would be a nuclear power and upset the balance of power in that part of the world. I thank my colleague for yielding. I thank all of my colleagues for making these insightful comments.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, we are going to Mars--Mars or bust. We are going to send a human crew to Mars in the decade of the 2030s. We are right at the cusp of the breakthrough to show how this is possible. I have just returned from the Kennedy Space Center, meeting with its Director, Bob Cabana. All of the ground infrastructure--the two launch pads--are being reconfigured. Old abandoned launch pads on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station are being redone with new commercial launch pads. Less than 2 years from right now, in September of 2017, we will be launching Americans again on American rockets to go to and from the International Space Station. Three years from now, we will be launching the full-up test of the largest and most powerful rocket ever invented by mankind, the Space Launch System, with its spacecraft Orion, which will be the forerunner that will ultimately take us to Mars. This appropriations bill that we passed just before Christmas treats NASA with a decent increase of over $1 billion and puts the resources into each part of NASA--its scientific programs, its technology programs, its exploration programs, its aviation, and especially aviation research programs--to keep us moving forward in our development of technology. I am especially enthusiastic about bringing this message because 30 years ago today, I had the privilege of launching on the 24th flight of the space shuttle into the heavens for a 6-day mission. Let me tell you about some of the members of this crew, just to give you an idea of how accomplished these people are. In NASA terminology in the space shuttle, the commander sits on the left seat; on the right seat, his pilot--in effect, his copilot. He handles all of the systems. In almost all cases, those pilot astronauts are military test pilots. They are so good that when they land that space shuttle without an engine, they have one chance; they are so good they can put it on a dime. Of course, our crew, 30 years ago launching from pad 39-A--the same pad that I saw on Saturday that has now been transformed into a commercial launch pad under lease to SpaceX--that crew was the best of the best. The two pilot astronauts were naval aviators. In the left seat was CDR Hoot Gibson--Robert Gibson, the best stick-and-rudder guy in the whole astronaut office. He could put it down, and you would hardly know that the wheels had touched. In the right seat, then Marine colonel, now Marine general, retired, Charlie Bolden, who then went on to command three missions thereafter, and today is--for the last 7 years--the Administrator of NASA. He is the one who has transformed NASA and has us going in the right direction now to go to Mars and at the same time working out the arrangements for the commercial marketplace to flourish, as we are seeing with Boeing and SpaceX, which will be the two rockets that will launch in less than 2 years, taking Americans to and from the International Space Station. Let me tell you about the rest of the crew that launched 30 years ago today. The flight engineer, Steve Hawley, an astrophysicist. By the way, he is the one who deployed for the first time the Hubble Space Telescope. An astrophysicist, Dr. George ``Pinky'' Nelson. By the way, all of these guys are doctors. They are Ph.D.s. Also, Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz, an astronaut who came to America from Costa Rica--not speaking a word of English after high school and taught himself English. He has a Ph.D. in plasma physics from MIT. While he was still flying, seven times as an astronaut, he was building a plasma rocket. Today that plasma rocket is one of the propulsion systems that NASA is considering when we go to Mars. If you saw the Matt Damon movie, ``The Martian,'' the author of the book had consulted with Franklin about the technology that is referenced in the book as the propulsion that sent that spacecraft to and from Mars. Another is engineer Bob Cenker, an RCA engineer. We launched an RCA communications satellite in the course of the mission. The seventh is yours truly. I performed 12 medical experiments, the primary of which was a protein crystal growth experiment in zero-g, sponsored by the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham--their comprehensive cancer center. The theory was if you could grow protein crystals--and out of the influence of gravity--then you could grow them larger and more pure, so when you brought them back to Earth, examining them either through x-ray defraction or an electron microscope, you could unlock the secrets of their architecture and get the molecular structure. I also performed the first American stress test in space in an unmechanized treadmill. You wonder how in zero-g you can propel yourself running on a treadmill. I had to put on a harness with bungee cords that would force me down onto the treadmill, and I pulled and pushed with my feet. We were trying to see what happens to our astronauts who go outside on spacewalks. Their hearts would start skipping beats. So the idea was to get the heart rate up and use me as a comparison. Indeed, what happened was I ran for 20 minutes, pulling and pushing. Lo and behold I discovered that the tape recorder was not working and had to repeat it. It made so much racket in that small confined space that our crew was mighty happy when I finished. Thus, the space doctors had additional data to study, and they have published that. We thought it was the first stress test in space, but later on we found out that the Soviets had done stress tests--we don't know how long. On this occasion, 30 years later, of something that was transformative to me, I wish to say I am so optimistic of where we are going because we are going to Mars. If you ask the average American on the street, they think the space program is shut down because they visualize it as the shutting down of the space shuttle, but they will be reminded, reenergized, enthused and excited--as only human space flight can do--when those rockets start lifting off at the Cape in September of 2017, in less than 2 years, and we are beginning on our way to Mars. I thank the Presiding Officer for this opportunity on this 30th anniversary. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent that I be able to display on the Senate floor these two vials of liquid nicotine to tell what just passed.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I may be recognized as in morning business.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, in the Senate last year we passed the childproofing of caps on liquid nicotine. That legislation just passed today in the House and will go to the President for signature. This is important because we found that these bottles of liquid nicotine for these e-cigarettes, or electronic cigarettes, have not been childproofed. Therefore, if a child gets one of these bottles and it does not have the cap that they can't get off, we now know the experience from several poison centers across the country in the last couple of years. If a drop of that liquid nicotine gets onto the child's skin or, as infants typically do, they put things in their mouth and they ingest that liquid nicotine, indeed it is fatal. We have had a couple of fatalities in this country. Therefore, it was common sense for us to require--and thankfully, the liquid nicotine industry went along and did not object--to make these childproof. But that will now be in the law. Let me point out something. This is aside from the question of whether you should be inhaling this stuff in an e- cigarette. I think people are finding out that this is becoming quite dangerous as well. But aside from that issue, this was the issue of protecting children. Look at this. It has pictures of fruit all over the label, and it is called ``Juicy ejuice.'' It is something that is going to attract an infant's or a child's attention. It is the same thing over here. It has pictures of all kinds of happy things. I have seen others that have labels of juicy fruit. I have seen others that have multicolored labels that are very attractive. Common sense tells us if you are putting a product out that can kill children--just like some of the soaps that are put out for washing detergent in these little plastic bags that disintegrate when they get into water in your dishwasher or in your washing machine, and it smells so good, and they are grape scents--a child smells that and it feels so good and it is so soft. Where is it going to end up in an infant? They are going to put it in their mouth. We have had some deaths there. But that is another battle for another day. At least we have won one little battle. I am happy to report to the Senate that what we passed in the Senate in a bipartisan manner last year now passed the House today and will go to the President to be signed into law. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. I agree with my colleague from Washington--we cannot stand by and allow this harm to continue. The U.S. Government requires child-resistant packaging on other products, including over-the-counter medications and cleaning supplies. These rules have prevented countless injuries and deaths, and this important legislation will ensure we have the same protections in place when it comes liquid nicotine.