“If we’re talking outside the space launch field, then, hell, America innovates every day, in a myriad of fields. The field of metamaterials, for instance — invisibility cloaks, and hiding events from time itself? That’s just today, as I talk to you, and that’s all American. I realize there’s a narrative that America is all done, and doesn’t make stuff any more, and it’s midnight for the American experiment and all that, but that ignores the basic mathematics of a country with three hundred million people in it. For every bunch of dubiously photogenic fetal-alcohol-syndrome cases from New Jersey who get on the TV for ten minutes, there are ten times as many people at MIT inventing the future.”