Excerpts of NASA Administrator Charles Bolden speaking at a Sept. 14, 2011news conference at the Senate Dirksen Building, Washington, D.C., during which the selected design of a new Space Launch System was announced.

This new heavy-lift rocket will take the agency's astronauts farther into space than ever before, create high-quality jobs here at home, and provide the cornerstone for America's future human space exploration efforts. The boosterwill be America's most powerful since the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon and will launch humans to places no one has gone before.