zients will talk about the economy and jobs. that's live on cspan 2. here on c-span3, we have a day-long conference with the discussion on underrepresentation of hispanics in media, government and other sectors. that's live at 8:45 a.m. eastern. later in the day, house judiciary committee chair robert goodlatte will talk about presidential powers. that's live at 5:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. our campaign 2014 debate coverage continues. texas governor's debate between wendy davis and greg abbott. wednesday night at 8:00 p.m. on c-span, live coverage of the minnesota governor's debate between incumbent democrat mark

dayton and jeff johnson and hannah nicollet. thursday night at 8:00 p.m. on cspan, live coverage of the oklahoma governor's debate between joe dorman and mary fallin. also on c-span 2, the nebraska governor's debate between democrat chuck hassebrook and pete rickets. between john lewis and ryan zinke. c-span campaign 2014, more than 100 debates for the control of congress. now we go back to the george washington university forrum on mars exploration. this portion includes nasa chief scientist jame garvin. he spoke about the robotic missions taking place on mars and what they've revealed about the planet. this is 35 minutes.

[ applause ]. >> thanks. thank you very much. can everyone hear me? thank you very much. i want to take you on a tour really kind of like the ice lan dick sagas of what the science discoveries from mars especially in the last 14 years of our program of exploration known as the mars exploration program which is implemented at our jet propulsion lab has given us. i would like to leave you a thought that the science discoveries that i hope to convince you are real, they come from a large community of scientists across universities, nasa centers and private industry are really the impetus for human exploration of this planet. and many of us have been working these missions all the way back to viking, believe this. i hope i can give you that sense. i want to remind you of where we are. we are a long way today from mars, even though we're in a very close approach geometry right now. very good for telecommunication.

it's really, really striking that mars is not our mother earth. it's a profoundly different world. it does not read our textbooks. in fact, the mode we're in today for mars scientifically is one of rapid massive discovery. our ideas are changing with a large community of scientists working with missions like curiosity, mars reconnaissance orb tor, the landscape is changing. we don't totally know what we have. that's important as we look forward to the era of human exploration. in fact, mars is an ever-changing frontier. we're just realizing the questions we have to ask to allow us as that situational awareness. this is just a view we see of where we're going with curiosity over the next 100s of souls literally as we drive everyday, we see elements of the new mars.

so le me paint that picture for you by reminding you that science organizes itself in different ways. for the last almost 20 years, we've looked at mars science thematically, through four primary themes. obviously we would like to know whether we're alone in this universe, this is a profound question that goes back farther than we can record in history. but getting at the question of life, active biological systems, were there ever there, could they be there? it took humanity a long time on earth to understand the past history on our planet. that was a joke. so to get at the question of life, we need to look through the record books, recording elements of climate change, change of environment, the rock record, you know, the pages in stone that don't lie but are not always available to us. and through the preparation for having us be there to make these

discoveries. we've organized our program through these themes following different threads, understanding the role of water, mars is a water planet, we know that now. understanding whether there's places that if they were here on earth could be inhabited by organisms. could they be preserved if they were there and they're not preserved because they can't be, what good does that do us? we need to parse those through our program. so what we've done for the last 14 years with the restructured program that some of us were so fortunate to work on was develop a robotic science exploration program. every step is driven by questions we've had, high high pott these we're testing. new approaches, new measurements. the mars we've seen during the course of this program as you see all the way back to around

2,000 all the way to present and moving forward is about questions, measurements, the same way we people would attack programs in science. this is all about stem. it puts together the engineering, the science questions, the math and the technology to solve problems. we've been doing that remarkably effective. our batting average is literally 1,000. many teams would love to have it. we've done it very well since this program came about. it's a partnership with engineering. i want you to understand, we can't do all of this without engineers helping us do that. the fact that many of these missions survive today, way beyond design life, opportunity being a good example is really testament to that. so let me explain the discoveries we've been making. this will be the movie version. many of my colleagues would like to tell it and would tell it much better than i with more time. let me try to do that.

first, let me remind you the mars we see is rather foreboding. it's not really waiting for us. it's extremely cold. oxidizing, can't breathe the air, lost its magnetic field, don't understand why the surface deposits of dust that are very inconvenient, sub micron scale, not good for space suits or rovers or actuators or camera lenses, this is not the place you would go for your summer vacation. scientifically, though, it is. and we've learned that since the first voyages of the '60s and into the viking era that it really is impressive. are really, if you will, a misnomer for what really mars has done. we have to look at the mars today and project back in time to a planet that really we think records in its record books some things that really actually help us understand our planet earth. so let's look at it.

mars has an extremely rarefied atmosphere today. in fact, we've often talked about the temperature at our toes for a short guy like me in my head would go through a gradient of tens of degrees. the difficult to do here on earth, common on mars. the kinds of surface liquid water we like here on earth necessary for the kind of microbial life that's rampant, can't exist today. water on the short term human life scale, days, weeks is unstable. but that could change. mars, in fact, does climate change really well. the record of water on mars in the minerals and the landscapes pretty much wherever we look is there. we've learned that. so if someone says we discouverd water on mars, well rk, we kind knew that. thank you. what does that mean? how much was there? where did it go? how would that have affected the geological history the eternal

evolution the climate and the looking for signs of life? many of us believe that the mars we see today at one point reflected a history where water was a prominent surface feature, lakes and sees if not oceans covered the lowlands. i should point out, the reason we can do this kind of study is because way back in the '90s we had the forethought to make measures of the very fine scale topography and character of the landscape so we can literally flood mars and play the tape back in time and ask what would it have been like? does that make sense? physics and chemistry. and that's what we've done. this also allows us of course to figure out where to land in an engineering sense. we flood mars and the lowlands and the northern plains often covered with dust, large basins, the biggest impact site we've discovered in the solar system. these systems would be under water. some of the signs gee

morphically that tell us this may have been the case. we're still looking for the shorelines and how that would be reflected in the shape of the planet, but nonetheless, we see that. and then there's the question of the record of life. and on earth, we sort of know or at least we think we do. and we look back in time to the earliest times of our planet, coming out of late/heavy bombardment. the planet became inhabitable by the single cell world into the world we know with primitive dna, a few billion years ago. that's recorded in the rock records, things got a little better in terms of the atmosphere and the more complicated organisms us came about. that's where we think we know very sim plisically on earth. the question is we see records of these things recorded in the rock record on our planet, which is extremely dynamic. the question is, well, could this have happened on mars and could it have been preserved? this is a key question. if it happened and it's not preserved, we can't tell.

how do we find snout how do we ask is the mars of today reflecting a history like this or a flatline history or even a history of extent life? what we did about 14 years ago after some setbacks in mars exploration in the late '90s, we restructured an entire program. the best women and men in the country together working with our team at jpl. first, we'll do the reconnaissance. where do you go? it's a big planet. 150 mile square kilometers, you can't go everywhere. let's understand where the action is from orbit. let's land where the actions is and move around as if we were there. sort of apollo without the astronauts with reasonably smart robots and then eventually get to a point where we can do analysis and return stuff from mars to earth. by the way, while we were doing this we realized that there are meteorites delivered to us from

mars rather favorably by mother nature. we can also study and put that together to understand the planet and we have been remarkably successful. since the orbitors known as odyssey and through two rovers like spirit and opportunities landers like phoenix and currently curiosity and of course moving on to maven which is on the way, we have rewritten the textbooks. the kids of 2,000, the young mill len yal stemmers would see a new mars in their textbooks 2014. things we didn't know about the magnetic field back then. but these are just some of the balls reflecting the data sets we produced. some of them have huge science value. the magnetic field. the topography which is good enough to land things on as well as to follow the water. understanding of the minerals and context of dust. we have seen a diverse planet with complexity over time.

let me just fill in the tape. over those years what we've been able to do through our missions is increase the resolution and the detail across the wavelengths of electro magnetic radiation to see the planet. we actually have a mini mars observing system in place now on the surface in orbit to study this world, this fourth planet. and some of them tell us about the character of what the surface is like compositionally. others tell us the character on the scale we would walk on. by the way, when we first put together the road map to have cameras that could see things the size of beach balls on the planet, many colleagues said, we don't need that. why would one want to see those things? engineers kind of did want it, i must add. but lot of scientists said let's do other things. but i can say now with some confidence that the team that were able to build these amazing instruments for orbit, the success of those have allowed us to watch ourselves drive on the

planet and make choices strategically that help us with where we are. what did we learn from this? we started to see exposures at the scale we can imagine ourselves exploring. relationships between rock layers that tell us of the history of water and wind evolved on the surface and even the detail to pick places to go. and so we went from an era of first landing viking -- this is viking ii in september of '76. there's the flag, of course, color balanced though mars atmosphere is not quite so blue. amazing site, the probability of landing safely in this bolder field was about 40 to 50%. we didn't know it was a bolder field and so we landed any way. pretty heroic. we landed then with new delivery systems with the air bag assisted pathfinder, moving on to the era of the rovers which basically gave our program the vision at the surface to ask the tough questions that begot

curiosity where we are today 606 days into our exploration. but the surface missions starting with the first lander on another planet from viking have painted a continuously changing picture. viking, cold, sterile desert, nothing would survive that would be related to modern biology. transitions into the rock world mars that we saw with pathfinder. into the history of water world. we saw and still see with the mars exploration rover such as opportunity, 36-plus kilometers and driving into this world that we're now probing with new instruments with curiosity. so, what have we learned? a lot. and we still have not assembled the jigsaw puzzle. mars has lots of interesting variations and composition. dust storms, active surface change on hourly scales, dust avalanch avalanches. explosive faces. impact craters that expose the

surface like natural drill rigs. all this together with areas where we've actually seen the water. there's a little trench from our phoenix scout mission in 2078. we have seen sub surface layering with radars that have been partnered with italy to show us the way that climate record on mars is put together. all this paints a picture for a blan et that is really profoundly interesting, alluring and compelling to get ourselves there. but, wait, there's still -- there's still problems. first, on our nice convenient earth we have mother nature's natural force field with our great magnetic field protecting fr us from all that nasty stuff. mars does not obviously have bumps on it, it has relic magnetic signatures.

magnetic electron experiment. and we think then that mars inside versus earth is very different. we're a dynamic planet exchanging energy from the inside/out with dynamically rotating core. producing all this cool stuff, encompasses work, all this. mars, that story changed. maybe it wasn't quite big enough to retain the con vektive energy to do that. we're still working on that. insight will contribute to understanding. this picture, as it launches in 2016. but again, a different world. we also know that there's a diversity of kind of places on mars. the things you see here in terms of all these strange names of mineral phases and stuff i won't go through them ad nauseam with you, but every one of them has a baring on how you record the history of water and sediments that could preserve potentially the history of life. if it is preserved as organic

chemicals, we've seen all these things since we began -- reagan our program in 2000. all this gives us, if you will, the impetus to want to be there, to want to touch the rocks that contain carbon phase molecules. to be able to go to the place with chlorides that might reserve records of life. why not on mars? these become questions for biologists not geologists like myself. we've been able to organize the landscapes of mars in time. all the way to the present through the different landscapes we've measured from orbit with these powerf fuful reconnaissan steps. we put it in there in 2,000

against many colleagues saying do you really want that to be able to give us a vision to do this. hutten and smith put together in the 19th century for earth and we've done that. we have we have fosle river deltas on mars. places that reflect the layering history of the role of water and wind working together and we've seen that mars is pummelled by the stuff of space, our atmosphere shields us but mars isn't and every one of these blemishes now on the order of 250, 300 of them tell us basically about the shallow interior of the planet as it is affected by the exogenic world of space. you all remember february 2013 and other events like that. this is common. all the meteor showers, well on

mars, they're not showers. they produce impact events. other events craters the size of football stadiums and small cities and they expose the shallow sub surface. what you see on the surface is not always what ewe want to see when you measure things on mars about some of these very tough questions we're asking. little far there. we're also -- we've also discovered that mars has gone through major changes in the way it's geology is reflected in the rocks from a time when it was wetter. this is a paper by banfield and others. when it was wetter and the kinds of volcanos erupted that were explosives, st. helens. to the dhiend are today oozing lava. this is a very important step. we have also seen with our mars exploration rovers an amazing history of water in the rocks at two different sites, thousands

of kilometers apart. we renamed things, blueberries and newberries. and then we transitions. when we reagan this program in 2001, we looked at the idea of putting the best instrumentation with the most powerful vantage point we could get on the surface, we did that through a mission known as the mars science laboratory today with the rover called curiosity and this behee mouth the size of a mini cooper or vw bus carries with it 14 different experiments including ones that deal with weather and radiation, for decent images, for chemistry in different ways and she's been a beauty. i'll give you a brief synopsis now. we've mae made more measurements that this slide shows. nearly almost 500 gigabytes of data has been released. everything ranging from our own little self portrait which is an interesting piece of engineering to use an arm and photograph a

w job by curiosity to the measurementeds we've made by not actually touching rocks. a partnership with france. to the instrument known as sam that can actually measure things on mars as good as the labs that measured the rocks that buzz brought back from the moon, we can now do that on mars without bringing them home. talk about engineering, vision, science can now measure parts per billion at the level of detection where we can actually see that we contaminated aspect of our experiment with florida air we can do that on mars. and so, let me just remind you again, we're a long way from home. you know, at closest approach, 35, 36 million miles once every 15 years, but earth and moon are small dots relative to this view from curiosity. so, this mobile laboratory, even though she sometimes moves at the pace of a giant tortuous is

an amazing feat. she is seeing things to me as a geologist are spectacular. these conglomerated rocks with bits of rocks made of other rocks are what we expect to see when streams and rivers leave deposit its that are baked into stone. this is gio one. that's good. water flowed. shallow water. we now know what it was made of. we've drilled mars. these drill holes are the size of a dime, but we have drilled the surface. measured down centimeters, collected it and made measurements inside our belly with this integrated mass speck trom ter gas system allot of words for a really cool set of hardware developed at goddard and france that allows us to measure exactly what made the stuff you see here. you can see the surface materials we exkoe vated are not the classic brown red or red color of mars that is almost

brown. what we discovered on mars in 06 days of work, there are environments that would be habitable in they were on earth. the buildup of the kind of chemistry we know and love, this is the classic el mental stuff we need for life to do its thing. there was probably water there. the minerals and oxidation suggest there was energy. some use under the ocean today. so we have found habitability works on mars. the question is what does it preserve about what might have been there? that's the challenge we face with curiosity and beyond. one of the other things we did, not even imagined when we launched the mission. we took that rover with its mass speck trom ter and we were able to use it not only to measure what stuff is made of and how it got there but by using clever chemistry, our team at cal tech and at goddard were measure the age of the rocks. this was a huge goal for mars as

early as 2,000 we now did it on mars as a side bar to what we were trying to do. we also measured the surface exposure age. this is really important. while the rocks are really old, older than any rock on earth, like the lunar rocks, they've only been exposed for a few tens of millions of years. what we see in those rocks exposed is very important because we now know from new lab work that's been done around our community on this mission that the space radiation, that nasty stuff that we were talking about earlier today destroyed organic molecul molecules. you won't know you found the stuff you're looking for. so we have to be more creative and clever. we think we understand that the materials that are buried deeper relative to these little hills are protected from space radiation relative to those that are constantly being skaf anged by the wind. so if you're trying to find organic molecules, you can't

look out on the nice smooth parking lot. they'll be baked by radiation for tens of millions of years. you have to go into places where they're exposed or more protected. this will be important for human explorers to understand that when we start exploring ourselves. so the mars we see today is kind of like the bad lands of the american southwest or mongolia, kazakhstan, really rather telling layered rocks, we love them. this is mt. sharp, this is an artist rendering of the what the ancient mars could have been like. the measurements we made of these isotopes of key elements suggest that we can possibly understand the earlier atmosphere of mars to be a window into whether it could have inhabitable. is there a record of past life? we've done that. the mars we see, this is it, you know, doesn't look like beach front terrain today is really a

challenging terrain. we've seen wheel wear on our rovers. we've driven across it for more than 6 kilometers. we know it was habitable. that's the record in the rocks. what we don't know is how long that stage of habitability existed. our stage team the trying to understand that. was it a long period? was it a short blip? did it cycle? carl sagan talked in much better language than i about the cycling nature of climate on mars. was an attempted humor at lunchtime. forgive me, not funny. but in any event, we don't know. we have more measurements to make. that's why the robotic program, the science push for human exploration to open our window, our eyes to the windows are so important. now, i have to show one bit of humor. we found some interesting rocks on mars that one of our scientists founds looks a lot like mummified seals you see in the an arctic. you're imagination can take you

wherever you want. i found my initials many times so i know i've been there. some people think they've seen walmart. i'll leave that to others. but more importantly, we have been pursuing this line of reasoning, we have found the water. water-altered rocks, ice, we have discovered that there are habitable zones on mars. certainly on gale crater from curiosity. obviously with opportunity and evidence in gusef crater. we're still looking for this one. connecting these things up to there and maybe it will take this, maybe we'll get so far and then it will take the humans, but this record of potential biology, particularly the record of past life which we think will be a better hypothesis to test scientifically is really important. so, we've made great progress. the real question then is how can we use this bow wave of science, this era of almost

renaissance-like discoveries with a large science community, literally more than 1,000 scientists across universities and other institutions are working mars now. we've built up that community internationally. how can we use that to ensure the sustainment of this questioning regime to question into human exploration? so i leave you in the next five minutes with my final thoughts. first, unfortunately it's not easy. we've all heard mars is hard spoken in different languages. and whatever. but, you know, we really want to see whether there's any record of the kinds of carbon that would record the signature of past life in the chemistry and understand where that stuff goes and how that links to modern life. the diagram, by one of our best and brightest young scientists kind of shows all the action. we don't know how things are escaping from mars. we haven't understood how the surface water percolates in gullies. we don't yet know if there are brian fwllows. the questions raised here by how

all this stuff cycles, whether it's min earlized, we have to get at that if we're going to be serious and maybe it will take human exploration to tie that together. we have seen active features, some colleagues believe these c floes, recurring slope linear, sliding down the slopes of crater walls may be floes of brine. these have been found in multiple sites. could there be reservoirs of these low-melting point fluids? we don't know. maven, a lot of people ask, another orbiter, don't we need another rover? we would love a rover. how has mars lost its atmosphere? it's done that. in earth our atmosphere recycled

itself, became habitable. mars maven, lockheed martin, instruments from all over the world is going to address that question and, after it does that, and it asks primarily how an atmosphere that is today rather unbreathable co2, nice for plants but not so much us. how it has evolved in time by reading the record of what's happened today in situ through various experiments, mass spe o spectometer. the mission was selected on the basis of its science and engineering. that's how we do things in science. kind of like the stem olympics. send a mission to mars. if you're real good, you get a lot of -- whatever the judges score now. it's good stuff. taking a little selfie.

m maven will do that. critical ratio that tells you about escape rates for mars is different. viking with very good measurements. this is what we would thought we would see from meteorites and this is what we got from one data point from curiosity. we want to fill in how it would go from there to there. these are big changes. we need to get at that. maven will do that. we can actually use it as a telecommunication orbichlt ter, allowing us to talk to rovers and other things on the surface. big final thing i want to leave you with is this is what we're up against on mars. 10,000 feet of layered rocks. taken us 600 days to get halfway into this zone here. we want to get up into there by the end of the curiosity

mission. it's a long drive through rough terrain, you know. some of our best astronauts will tell me they could probably walk it in a day. it's taken 600. different economies of scale and efficiency. so i leave you with a couple of -- i hate to use these dig diagr diagrams. i do love them. science-driven program asking questions like curiosity, what the directorate does. it is, in fact, humans to mars, this meeting and this would be a kind of goal that would be open to serendipty by having human people -- obviously human people. women and men in contact with the science. not light minutes away.

it will be different than apollo. this is what we're doing with the space station and the next steps beyond that. we put this together all moving toward this goal. this is the key first step together with that. you've heard that today. so, how will we explore with people? final point is there's lots of opportunities. telescience that we've already used in the ocean. artist rendering of how robots on the surface with people, obviously, large -- they're all good. choosing one is not so important now. it's more important to get the people there with the questions to ask. this partnership that we start

to bring the human exploration into space, people bring skills that robots, however we build them, how long whoa take, will never catch up to. we will always be able to adapt. sometimes nonlinearly, different than our robotic warriors. that's good. it's the partnership that matters. we're here and here. biology, geology, climatology. this is a big step. this step is going to beget that. two thoughts. science has given us the ammunition to know what we want to ask when we go. the robotic program will continue through our mars 20 rover and missions in the 20s to open the door to what we need when we get ourselves there. that will change everything,

folks. this will be like the columbus moment. to ask questions that we can't ask today with our brilliant robotic program. i don't think you've seen anything yet. mars has never disappointed. it's a discovery engine. let's keep going. thank you. [ applause ] i'm told i have limited time for a question. i'm one guy representing a science community of thousands. don't pummel me with too much. >> one question. >> go ahead. >> good to review. you have mentioned some results on water, you have talked so much about organics, the next step before looking for life. we have a mission that searches for organics, possibly signs of life with a drill. what is the plan in the u.s. and what is the next mission that you think we need before we go

with humans? >> bernard, thank you. jim green will be talking about the whole program architecture this afternoon. he is the plantry division directorment i'm just a mars science geek. good question. that mission is the leap to the subsurface we've all been waiting for ever since i was on viking as an intern. to get below the depth where the ionizing radiation will modify the chemistry or at least we think that depth and by sampling that stuff with a very powerful set of instruments, pastel payload in germany, we will look for organics for the first time directly in the context of the samples. exo mar sincere a key step beyond everything i showed you. the discovery potential of exo mars in 18, the mission with russia and other partners is critical as will be the mars 20 rover. it's valid.

we're not done. robotic programs have to keep going beyond maven and insight, heat flow background on mars. there's the exo mars mission on 16. there's our mars 20 rover and then there's the 20s open to all the young stem people here. excellent point. we're thrilled to have the partnership we have with this next generation. subsurface. so we want to go, you know -- i'm not six feet. bernard's mission and isa's mission will get us there. folks, science lives. thank you. up next, a discussion on how

science, technology and math is important to the space program. this is also a discussion on mars exploration. it's an hour. >> the key note and first panel this morning was enlightening to me. we're going to leverage and continue with that discussion. the way i wanted to run this panel is i'm going to give a bio on each one of the panelists and let them go through discussions and charts that they have. then we really are very willing to answer any questions they have. please be thinking of questions you have as we're starting

through this. the first thing i should say is one of the panelists, or actually the moderator, didn't make it for a couple of reasons. one was sick and the other wasn't. randy sweet was kind enough to jump in for us today. james brown, sitting to my left, is executive director of the stem education coalition. this is an alliance of more than 500 business, professional and educational organizations and it works to raise awareness in congress, the administration and other organizations about the critical role that stem education plays in enabling the u.s. to remain the economicoloi. i'm happy to see stem is getting more and more attention as we go on. prior to joining the coalition,

james was an assistant director for advocacy of the american chemical society, nuclear engineer. previously worked as a legislative aid for doc hastings of washington, director of policy and development at the consumer energy council of america and began his career with newport news ship building, working on aircraft carrier construction. thanks. i might have flown off a couple of those carriers you worked on. probably not. >> good chance. >> i probably threw off the ones that were there before you were. masters from penn state, both in nuclear engineering, and holds an mba from george washington university. with that, james -- >> thank you. thank you, kent. so it's a pleasure to be here and to speak to an audience like this. it's also relatively tough to speak to an audience about space issues when you have so many distinguished people like buzz aldrin and others in the

audience. it's definitely an honor. i'm always surprised by the breadth of stem education and different things that perfect vad our society. i like to think about one stat that summarizes our particular challenge quite well. a poll was done in 2011 by the harris group that polled parents about issues relating to stem education and they found that roughly 93% of parents considered stem should be a priority within the school system. but that only about 49% thought it was a challenge -- i mean was a priority in the school system. that is a challenge, if you really think about it. everybody recognizes the importance of the stem projects, whether it's to space, technology or future of computing or any other technological or scientific endeavor we know from our

history will lead to the future of the country. but we have yet to make the kinds of changes in our education system to really prioritize those subjects. certainly if we're going to get to mars we need to draw from every part of our talent spectrum to get there. it's going to take smart engineers, smart astronauts. it's going to take people who can build the equipment that will get us there. it's going to take welders, people of every background to be able to do that. but the other poll i'm quite fond of -- this is a poll from several years ago. 68% of parents think their kids are in the top third of their class. if you think about that, that sort of illustrates the first statistic quite well. how to build a competitive workforce that can support the kinds of grand national missions like going to another planet, i think about three things. one is we need to get our

federal house in order. as we all know, we're dealing with the political gridlock of perhaps a century or more. and that is going to have a high water mark. and i hope it will recede. it will get to working on challenges like improving our education system at a national level. and so the united states invests about $3 billion in stem education programs, scattered across some 250 programs. that, in itself, is a challenge. i know people in the nasa family are dealing with issues of efficiency and trying to get the most out of federal investments. we have to make sure those investments are well spent and they're making the kinds of big bets towards improving education. the other thing the states are dealing with what are called the common core standards in math and science. that is an interesting opportunity for us to improve math and science education across the board. of those standards developed by the states. there are lots of collaborations

between states and one another. and it would be nice if, when my daughter, who is 4 1/2, is in the seventh grade and we decided to move from the district of columbia to the state of washington or somewhere else that we wouldn't have to repeat algebra. that's another positive thing that's moving in the right direction. if you think about the workforce that underlies the stem fields it's a little known fact that roughly 50% of that workforce is not going to require a four-year degree to enter that workforce. when you think about stem education, at least in the minds of policy makers in this town, most of the time they're thinking about the rocket scientists. they're thinking about people who are going to study in graduate school and who are going to measure their productivity by things like patents and intellectual property and other things. half the jobs right now that are available in the stem fields don't require a four-year degree. technicians, auto mechanics and everybody uses software these days. even if you're going to work at

the most basic level in the stem field, building something in an advanced facility you're going to need a background. those are three important trends that underlie the challenges of getting to mars, of improving our health care, of dealing with every other major challenge our country faces. >> great. thank you. you know, i already have a question for you, james. it makes a lot of sense, it's important to improve our education facilities, quality of education. what about the other side of how do you incentivize these children to want to go into the stem fields? is that a big piece of it as well? >> you ask the 93% of parents if it's a priority, most of them -- can we go to the next slide? so, one of the stats that you'll see is that most of the parents get that stem is where the jobs are. and i think if you look at the

pipeline of students going into those fields, what you'll find is the parents see the connection between getting a good stem education and jobs, but there are lots of parts of our society that are being left out of this. if you look at, for example, the stem workforce, african-americans are 11% of the population, but only 3% of the stem workforce. and the same is true for hispanics. it's also true for certain fields for women. that's one of the challenges in terms of how do we expand that pipeline and how do we really get at that challenge? it's not just good policies and education, so they have good tests and you have good curriculum and well-trained teachers. the kids can see the examples of science and technology in society if they have mentors in their families, if they have good role models. and i think you're starting to see that emerge in the computing fields. look at the popularity of the cosmo series.

that is really getting attention. it's not often that you have a face like his in the big face of technology and enterprise. >> thank you. the next panelist is julie van kleek, aero jet rocketdime. technology development and product development programs. miss van kleek joined aero jet in 1981 and was appointed to her position in 2013. space and launch business unit and the space program's organization for aero jet. from 2004 to 2005, she was executive director for atlas programs. from 2001 to 2004, she served as executive director space systems business development responsible for strategic direction, investments and growth of aero jet space propulsion business.

from mid 1999 to october 2001, she managed a multinational project during which she interfaced extensively in affiliated government agencies. miss van kleek earned her bachelor of science degree from the university of california and has extensive hands-on experience in rocket research and development, liquid rocket, system design, development and testing. gosh, there's a lot of great stuff here. she also is a chairperson of the european space propulsion board of directors. so, anyway, i guess to summarize this, and in julie's own words, she truly is a rocket scientist. so, julie? >> i used to be. i'm going to go over here. can i have the first slide,

please? i think that's the last slide. isn't it? oh, well. what i'm going to talk about is actually the -- you know, going to mars and how that affects u.s. competitiveness. and i'm going to do that from the standpoint of being a rocket company. as i start this out, let me talk about what competitiveness is. i'm sure everybody has a different idea of what that means, if you look at definitions. it's the ability to sell things into a market relative to others. and if you think about the u.s., i would say that, you know, we're very competitive. many people would say we're very competitive worldwide. i think a lot of that has been because we've been technical leaders, you know, and pushed the envelope in a number of things, which is a part of, you know, the american spirit. you know, as you get more of an international marketplace, you know, that's still very important. but the other way for

competitiveness is how do you maintain, you know, being the best value or cost effective? and that, you know, speaking from being a rocket scientist, we've always pushed the envelope, but only in the last, you know, ten years has being more cost competitive really come into, you know, our vernacular. we were always like can you really do it? now space is becoming everybody's life. it's becoming more of an international commercial marketplace. so now it's how do we become competitive? so you look at this and you say, okay, humans to mars. does that have an affect on american competitiveness? and i would say it absolutely does. you know, if i look at what makes you competitive, what makes, you know, many of our aerospace companies competitive, it's do we have the technology? are we going to, you know, push the envelope and sell those things and provide those things that no one else has? then do we have products that meet certain needs? and then do we have the

workforce that can keep all that going and keep, you know, making ourselves more competitive, and keeping this a sustainable business? so i would say with, you know, trying to get to mars, we're going to attack every single one of those things. and i think it's -- you know, could bring great value to this country. next slide, please? you've seen this slide before. you saw it earlier. i think both mr. bolden as well as the past panel used it. and if you look at it, it's showing -- charting a course to mars. and some people say we're not going to mars until 2030. i would say we're going to be going to -- we're building the infrastructure, the workforce, the products to take us to mars and that will be ongoing for the next 15 to 20 years. and it's necessary because this is a very difficult thing to do, but along the way, we're going to be driving competitiveness into the people and the companies within this country. and, likely, worldwide. you know, if you look at --

reflect on this slide, we're going to see some of the basic building blocks for this, the s.i.s. and orion system. the most powerful rocket ever built. orion will be a very special crew capsule that will be able to do many kinds of missions. in developing this infrastructure we've had to face technological challenges we haven't had to do before. in that, we will expand capabilities of our workforce. once we have these products, you know, we've moved from just pushing the state of the art. now we have products to sell to other applications. talking about modularity and using things. if you look at where we're at in this country, we're not where we were during apollo, just trying to achieve a very specific goal. here, we're looking at sustainability. here, we're dealing with constrained budgets and with those things we drive the need to look at the problem

differently. we can't just spend money to go achieve a singular goal. we live in a budget-constrained environment. every investment we make, furthering science, furthering technology is very important. we want to be doing that in a way that leaves us with products that can be used elsewhere, making good on that investment. and that's the thing that this budget constraint environment is doing, is putting us all in that environment of having to think about how do i -- how do we create architectures, create products? not just achieve a very difficult thing but also can be useful in other ways. to me, that underscores the definition of being competitive. next slide, please. okay. mars is hard. okay. mars is -- you've heard, you know, many of the different challenges. it's pretty exciting when you think about him trying to attack all those different things, you know, with the amount of

resources he has been allocated. it also gives you a perspective of what we're facing to do this. as we, you know, attack each of those different technologies in the areas of, you know, transportation and for us that means propulsion. rocket company. but light support and the landing. we're going to overcome a number of difficult things, create new technologies and see those things result in other products we can't even imagine today. we think of the many things that came out of the apollo program and space program to date. we see the cameras in our cell phones, clean water systems that are being used in mexico. you know, attacking those many different technological hurdles will result in things that will benefit, you know, not just the mars program, but mankind and companies, you know, across the world. next slide, please. and with that, you know, this will enhance the competitiveness

of companies within the u.s., as i think we were going through, putting together for this panel every dollar invested in human space flight has returned $8 to the u.s. economy. i would imagine we would see a similar type of return. you know, not just going to mars but on our journey to mars, as we move through, you know, getting beyond earth alliance and on to mars in the 2030s. next slide, please. and then i bring it to home. i work for a rocket company. we heard a little bit about solar electric propulsion. we had some questions about that, you know, with the last panel. and, you know, to me this is a product that, you know, solar electric propulsion, the reason it's important, it's much, much more efficient, if you can use it for a certain application, much more efficient than commercial. that means you carry much less propellant. if you look at where you're at today, you're using solar

electric propulsion in some of our -- you know, in our satellites, both government satellites as well as commercial. the commercial world has really jumped on board. you see a number of different satellite architectures being upgraded to go partial or all electric. that's because the economics are good. you know, the place of solar electric propulsion in the pursuit of mars is to develop the higher power systems and to develop those infrastructures such as solar electric tugs that were in the last panel we talked about barges. think about barges in space, to actually move things around. these will be far more cost effective than doing this with chemical propulsion. now you don't have to lift all that propellant off the earth. you lift a much smaller portion of that. you look at the types of systems that are relevant to our, you know, pursuit of mars, we'll be driving the power up, the capability of solar rays,

propulsion systems and power systems and what we'll see is those migrate into the commercial satellite world in the next generation or the generation after that in their buses. and so truly enhancing, by developing this, we'll enhance the competitiveness, you know, the propulsion industry and the commercial satellite industry, in general. so, you know, i just tried to give you a snapshot of some of the key things that i think can come from this. i've tried to bring it home to what it means to a particular company like ours in propulsion. and i look at all the things that we're going to see today. i look and say we're finally making science fiction real and i really am thankful to be part of it. thank you. >> thank you, julie. so the panelist on the end here is randy sweet. in his defense, until about seven minutes ago, he didn't

even know he was on this panel. so, he was kind enough to jump in when i heard randy was in the area, i thought, randy will be great. i've had the benefit of getting to work with him. randy has been with lockheed martin over 30 years, director of their civil space and business development. he has a heritage back in the shuttle program. matter of fact, he was an orbital test conductor. when the shuttle is being processed and getting ready to fly, when the astronauts climb in the vehicle, they are working with otc, orbital test conductor, if you will. randy, with that, the floor is yours. >> thanks, kent. obviously, i don't have any prepared remarks. but i would like to talk a little about my perspective of -- first, i'll talk about stem here a little bit. we obviously, on the orion program, we do a lot of work in the area of stem, both domestically and

internationally. i have to say we had an international conference ten years ago with james cameron was one of the keynote speakers and one of the things he told us, and we've kind of built upon this, is you guys should take a look at the entertainment industry and look at what they do. and even use the word avatar. this was way back before the movie "avatar." basically what we find in stem -- we're missing this from the shuttle days. kent, you know this well. we would send crews out to events, flight crews out. and the students would ask lots of questions about what it's like to fly and what it feels like and some of those things. that's certainly a motivator for stem, for students. the other one is, you know, near-term successes and events. we're starting to make a lot of progress on orion.

we have the flight test coming up. we have lots of events where we'll test a heat shield or transport something and it's amazing. social media just blows up. there's a lot of interest out there when we talk about mars. it's just incredible. but in a lot of cases, conferences like this, we're essentially talking to a fairly small community within ourselves. so it's really good that we have organizations like explore mars that are broadcasting this. but i think as we get closer to flying, that we have more engagement from pop culture and the entertainment industry. we do a lot of work with them. you'll be seeing more of that. once we get crews assigned and we start getting crews more involved in events, i think those are things that we can do to really kind of engage the stem community. we have a program we call the exploration design challenge coming up on orion where we're

flying a radiation test sample. we've had a contest. i can't remember the numbers but over 100,000 students have applied. this is open internationally. we've gotten 80 countries involved. we'll be announcing the finalist at the engineering and science festival coming up here. it's gotten a lot of attention. there's a lot of interest out there. so, i think we just need to keep doing that. >> thank you so much. and so folks that have questions, please start making your way to the mikes. to maybe put this in perspective, when guys like neil armstrong and buzz aldrin stepped on the moon, it had a phenomenal impact globally. a result of that is the huge numbers in aerospace engineering

technical fields today. as a kid, i was very incentivized by that. as a result where we are today, i think, all of our companies, the average age of a worker is in the 50s. so what we've seen is that huge generation that was inspired is moving through. and so in the next ten years there will be a large exxoexodue given a lot of responsibility. none of the old timers will be left. there's a big gap in experience. and so do we think something like going to mars, putting humans on mars can kind of reset that kind of excitement? i don't know. what do you think, james? >> i, for one, am a huge proponent of doing these kind of big things.

is there anything you can propose that would be bigger in science and technology than to put a person on mars and bring them back? i would ask this question slightly differently. i would say i'm sure in 1956 there were people sitting around saying, why on earth are we wasting our time about going to the moon? what's in it for us? what's the commercial value of that? what are the -- why will anybody care? but i don't think anybody looks back on that and doesn't think it was, number one, a good investment of federal dollars and of time and people and energy. and i think we would look back on going to mars the same way. because i think it's such a uniting force to try to do something enormous like that. and i also think the interesting dimension to that debate about space exploration now is that you have a viable commercial sector as well. so, you know, you can look at it as an inspiration for kids, you

can also look at it as a very american thing where you'll attract pruentrepreneurs who th of making fame and fortune off of it as well, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. >> do we have a question out here? >> mike goddard, space flight center. in my outreach to high schools, especially those that aren't located near nasa centers or in metropolitan areas, i'm finding that they really don't have any awareness of what the country is doing in space exploration. more significantly, their funding for stem is such a small percentage of that for other activities like athletics, for example. in fact, at this one high school they actually had to have a bake sale or something to have a robotics competition and they didn't get enough money, so they didn't have it. yet they've got this huge football field, you know. and so i guess my question is,

how do we encourage -- not only encourage the students to get interested -- in lieu of an active exploration, how do we bring that apollo-like interest in stem that apollo kind of generated on autopilot? it kind of just happened. young students wanted to get involved in engineering and science and math. we don't have that at this time, at least not that i'm aware of. so how do we get them involved in -- or interested in pursuing those things with a visibility that they see with the sports on tv and some of the other aspects of our society that aren't -- you know, that are more visible than the space program? >> so i'll start to answer that.

i think there's two halves to the equation. one of the keys in getting more kids interested in the stem fields and getting them in those types of careers is very -- very sobering. and that is we have to have policy changes that will make the kinds of things happen in the classroom and outside the classroom that will really make a difference. and so when i hear stories about schools that have tried to do these things on their own and have struggled it's not the first time i've heard that story. and i would say we do a very good job in our best high schools in the most affluent neighborhoods of dealing with the stem subject. when you watch a media report, it's a lot of times kids in white lab coats going to college before they were involved in the after-school program or the engineering competition or other things, already in that direction and we're accelerating them in that direction. there's another category of stories that aren't being told

as much about the struggling schools that also see that these subjects are important, see the jobs, the connections to the future but either don't have the resources, the expertise or the critical mass to make all that happen. that's where the policy change that i started talking about at the beginning is going to have the biggest bang for its buck, in those schools that will achieve that. the other half of the equation is the inspirational piece. if a child is properly educated and has all of the right supports in school but they never see the other end of the equation, they never see the grand design that they can fit into, or they never have the mentorship experience that they can fit into, then that's also a weak link. an interesting part of this is we're only starting to understand how to hook people from outside this sort of traditional stem, college-bound population into the stem fields. i think you can see this in the resonance of the astronauts of

color and women, too, and how young women relate to female astronauts. and i think that is something that we have to take into account when we're thinking about these things as well. i would also offer a challenge to the space industry. so if i had a meeting with james cameron, i would be thinking to myself, i wonder if we could get a number of space companies together and get a movie done about going to mars. and not, you know -- i know we've had movies like this before, but wouldn't it be nice to have one every so often so that people didn't look at val kilmer going to mars and say, i don't even know who that is, right? >> to follow up on that, you know, as i mentioned earlier, we do the best we can with stem,g given the budgets that we have. i think nasa does a great job of it. my fellow companies do a great job. we're certainly out there, doing everything that we can. as i said, i think we need to leverage a few things. one is upcoming events that we

have that we all need to take advantage of, try to get that out there and get the top tier media involved so it really is a topic of discussion on the -- all the talk shows and such. the other is leveraging pop culture. and it's amazing when you look at role models of these students, especially the k through 12, they really look at the entertainment industry. and it's really amazing, the leverage you can get out of that. and i still say astronauts are a big motivator for young kids. and we need to do more of that. we're talking to the folks trying to get crews assigned early and it's really tremendous, you know, the impact that you can have when you bring their role models into play. >> thanks. did we answer your question?

>> yes. how important do you all feel that cross energy and cross disciplinary synergy between green technology, medical technology is in helping american competitiveness? it seems to me the way to get more involvement, more money is to understand that there's a very deep synergy between all these fields and how do we organize to help maximize that any thoughts on that? >> great question. >> the first thing i would say, it's a relatively new concept.

it's a term that we need to determine its actual components are. when policy makers think about this, it was competitiveness with india and china. but in some sense i think we're also competing against ourselves because when you talk about federal investments, really competitiveness -- when i hear that term, i think about and doing that very well makes us competitive. are around the issue of equity. when the biggest potential gains

are getting people who are not within the stem pipeline into the stem pipeline, i think about that being a huge advantage that we have as a country because we have a tradition of trying to broaden opportunity for all americans. if you believe that brain power and capability are equally distributed across all different parts of our society that's, by far, the biggest gain because if you have role model that is can inspire people from all different backgrounds that's how you'll open up that pipeline. i don't think we understand what being more competitive in the global economy actually means and i think that's a good place to start. >> certainly as we -- create new

processes with dealing with harsh environments, that brings us to have a skill we didn't have before. that's one way to enhance competitiveness, assume iing th other thing, it forces us to think of ways to make things more cost effective in a constrained environment. that, by its nature, is forcing a number of companies now to look at their manufacturing processes, their development processes. as we talked about with stem, having a mission like this, and the many step it is takes to make this mission real, if we do our jobs right and we provide that inspiration of what this is, that will draw people, new people into our companies, you

know. and that enhances by rejuvenating, and bringing a different mindset. as ken said we tend to have an older workforce right now. infusing that workforce with a number of, you know, large percentage of just out of college. that will change the face of many of these companies that do very special things right now and make them stronger for the future. >> those kinds of things that we have to solve will cause us to all be more competitive. but one of the things that i've noticed internally, within our industry, is that now that we are converging on common goals here, you know, it's amazing how far we've come over the last few years now that we're all talking about stepping stones and the kind of missions that we need to do early to get to mars and some

great ideas about predeploying contingency capabilities and support so we can actually go do these missionings unlike when miles mentioned some of the explorers in the past didn't have that ability. but one thing i've noticed in our industry, because we have this common goal that while we're still competitive we are really working closely together. and so it creates a different kind of competitiveness. and then if you take that up to a global scale, we're not going to do this mission just in the u.s. alone. this is going to be an international mission. i fully believe that. my opinion. and so when you take what we've realized here domestically, in working together towards a common goal, i really believe we'll have a global common goal. we're starting to see that through the global exploration road map and some of the thing that is we're mapping out here

with national interests, bringing their capabilities to the party here on how we get to mars. and i think that in itself will create kind of a different competitiveness than we traditionally think of. >> thank you. i think we have a question over here. >> hi. i'm elizabeth wallace. i was an assistant at a presentation he gave at a local stem -- local school in maryland recently and it was on mars. and his room was packed, standing room only. the first class was all female students and i thought oh, this is a great trend and the second one was all male. it was like, okay. but it was really nice mix of both that were very, very interested and stayed the whole time and asked all kinds of questions. it's about maintaining that kind of inspiration. the second thing i would like to say is that when we had the

apollo program and the whole country got excited, as we know, that kind of passion is missing, as we know. i think we can incentivize by like using -- just as the iss is a stepping stone to mars i think suborbital could be a stepping stone to what it's like to be an astronaut and have more astronauts in our community that are neighbors. researchers conference i gave a talk called space tourism is the new higher education. and it was an idea for fund-raising on college campuses so that you can create your own astronaut varsity teams cross disciplinary and that you vote for and fund to people on your campus to go to space so that you can tell high -- middle school students and high school students, go to these universities that have these

astronaut programs and so they can start thinking about what college they want to go to. and then those astronauts can help to form that vision faster because you'll have more people going up. suborbital space tourism is the money. we really need to help them. that should not be the barrier. why not get inspired when you're 18 in space? why wait until you're 50 and maybe can afford it? thank thanks. >> thank you. i don't think that was a question, was it? so over here. >> very fast, i want you guys to speak to your audience tlout on the internet, please, and address this to the kids out there. why would they invest the time

and energy to do the things that it would take to get into a stem profession? >> that's a great question. i was just thinking about the audience of students and classrooms that are watching this under the previous question. because i do think there are an awful lot of packed classrooms when you talk about this particular topic. you know, there are a bunch of different reasons somebody would think about the stem fields as an opportunity. if i'm wearing my hat as a parent for a minute i'll tell you it's because that's where you'll get a good job and that's where you'll be a great citizen. if i'm wearing my entrepreneur's hat i'll say that's where you can make a name for yourself nowadays. last time i checked the best-selling app was just sold for $2 billion. so that might take an afternoon's worth of work somewhere to create that. that would be wonderful if that was my job. i would also say if you're interested in where the future is going, that's also where the future is going.

in the sense that we do have sort of an interesting astronaut now. i was thinking about the movie "gravity" while you were talking and the analogy and the example that sandra bullock has in that movie. but i also think that people can see those role models more frequently now than they did ten years ago. there are lots of images in our society that can promote that kind of awareness to kids. it's not just about getting a job or doing well but doing something that's interesting and fun, which is what most kids are looking for. >> great answers. question over here? >> my question had more to do with international competitiveness and our own space industry. where are we going to reach a point where we're not heavily reliant on heritage system for space technology? when we reach that point do you think it will make a huge difference in the rate at which

we're advancing, and the direction that we take? >> so i know i'm the moderator but i'll take a quick stab at that. i think they got that one pretty right this morning earlier when they were talking. the fact is that going to mars is hard. going to mars is very expensive. and so we need to put those dollars where we'll gain the most out of them as far as new technology technologies solar propulsion is one. going to mars is very risky. so we have astronauts in orbit today. they're literally minutes away from the earth's surface if we needed to get them home. once they've done a deorbit burn they're only six minutes away

from the earth's surface. going eight days away is probably the next good step. realistically, we're going to mars. you're months and months away from getting back home if something fails and you don't have a backup, an alternative. understanding those systems is really, really critical. the other one that keeps coming up was basic chemical propulsion. it takes a lot of mass. like what julie talked about earlier, it's an area where we really now can be very competitive globally, once we develop that technology. and it has a lot of applications that are very widespread, more so than just helping us get humans to mars. as a human, you probably don't want the human on that system, at least not for the long journey. it's kind of slow. for all the other mass, staging of equipment, orbiters and

landers, it's probably a great technolog technology. >> adding to that, it's enabling to some of the architectures we're talking about when you start looking at having the ability to take everything with with you that you need, including contingencies. it's really, really hard. the mass numbers just don't add up. having the ability to predeploy things, that's what sep does for you. you have to send it way ahead of time, can you predeploy capabilities so that you don't have to necessarily take everything with you. and i think that's enabling for some of the architectures we're talking about. not to mention it opens up commercial opportunities. and i think, you know, the u.s. does have a leadership position in some of these areas. if you look at an endeavor like mars, it's so broad. to think that we would lead

every part of it would -- it's probably not practical. we would look for those things that are, you know, most aligned with where the u.s. interests are. anybody that's part of this will end up with world leadership and some aspect of it. >> do you see us relying on u.s.-made rocket engines rather than russian rocket engines any time in the near future? >> at least for the next two weeks. >> okay. >> you look at economics in the most efficient way, to get payloads into orbit, the u.s. has a combination of rockets made right here in the u.s. some of the different engines are imported, obviously, and i'm sure you're referring to the rd 180 issue with the engines with russia. the flipside of that is what's

going on on the space station with cosmonaut sbchlt s and astronauts together. it's been unaffected and if anything it helps to stabilize relationships. >> iss tremendous success has been our ability to work with international partners and that has worked out very well. we need to leverage that going forward in terms of propulsion, i fully believe that down the road in the future, we'll have a combination of foreign and u.s. provided engines. >> thanks. >> great question. >> hi. chuck devine. the only group i'm currently a leader of is washington metro men's -- a few years back as part of the governor's workforce investment board in maryland leading a committee dealing with, among other things, getting people to come into tech fields, particularly in

aerospace. some of the things i heard as part of the governor's workforce investment board, young people -- now we're not talking 10 or 12-year-olds. we're talking about 19, 20, 22-year-olds -- are now starting to avoid stem fields. for reasons such as very work/life balance, very poor management in their fields and also this is the men's person in me coming out. one of the things that's become very popular in at least the high i.q. groups is, believe it or not, home schooling. because we don't like things that common core and we're getting better results teaching on our own than we are seeing in our schools. would anyone care to comment on this? are you doing anything to bring these kinds of problems to the attention of the people currently in the fields?

>> i'll take that one. there's so many interesting dimensions to this at any given time that stem education certainly is not a monolith. when i read the opinion pages about this issue there's a constant back and forth over whether we have too many of this type of engineer, not enough of that type of scientist. i think that's healthy of the field. it's not monolithic. we don't need more of all stem graduates and we don't train them all the same. one of the skill sets that is still not really a part of the mix, that explains some of the trend you're talking about -- what you see in some fields is a relatively high amount of turnover or leaving in the field by recent college graduates. the thought that they're going to do x, y, z and find out that the field is not really that. one of the ways in which you get at that challenge is making sure those kids -- the kids most commonly that don't stay within the stem fields didn't have a

person in their family that was involved in that field, they didn't have a mentorship experience, they didn't have an internship. and the next best explanation is that they didn't have the type of training and teams that has how most companies work. those are all things that are very hard to -- almost impossible to legislate. they're all social skills. and those are not things that we can expect, you know, standards or policies to address directly. i thivg the way you address them is by if you really make the stem projects a priority and hold the people who run our schools accountable for it, we'll phil figure out how to solve those challenges the same way we'll figure out which rocket system will get us to mars if we're going to go to mars. >> thank you. you bring up a really good point. this generation is different. so, i think all of our companies are trying to understand where

they're coming from. work/life balance. social media is key in how we work with the generations. the fact is that it's a much different world today than it was, you know, when buzz, sitting here, stepped foot on the moon from a country that had just come out of the depression, very difficult time we worked there. parents are aware -- but the students not necessarily. and certainly i have a bunch of friends who are interested in stem fields because i'm one of them. i tend to associate with people like that. but i was wondering if there are some takeaways that i could --

so i could communicate, get -- generate more interest in people that might not necessarily be friends with.

following things like this on social media. i would say one of the things that would be an interesting challenge is there are an awful lot of really cool people tweeting about science and technology issues and if i were somebody running one of these companies, who saw a really interesting project that a group of students at your high school were doing, i would want to be involved with it in social media. that's a good way to get recognition, to show your colleagues that somebody actually cares about these things. it's also a potentially good way

to raise money for your projects in school. i don't know anybody who doesn't see that as an incentive to be involved in something. >> thank you so much. >> thank you. great questions. >> coming up on the next "washington journal," congressman tom cole, combating isis. and mid term elections with representative donna edwards of maryland and later our series looking at the big 10 conference continues at the ohio state university with joseph steinmets. you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. >> c-span's 2015 student cam competition is under way. midland high school students will award 150 prizes totally $100,000