step by step, otherwise people are just not going to support us. >> thank you all very much. i really appreciate it. thank you. more from george washington university's mars exploration summit. the discussions moderated by science reporter miles o'brien, it's 50 minutes. all right, thank you very much, michael. so, gentlemen, let's get this straight. because what michael lays out there is a lot of technological challenges that requires about six to eight eureka moments that if you're keeping score. can we go to mars today in a perfect world if we had a blank check, could we go today? or is it impossible right now? >> i don't think it's impossible, but we clearly need to work on things we have talked about. it's not just going to mars, but actually landing on the surface.

>> one way to look at it, apollo 13 with the event that it had. i believe that was around 84 hours. we had to keep the crew alive for 84 hours. so we had life support systems, if you're going to go to mars that have to work for months, possibly over a year, depending on how long it takes you to get there and how long you stay. we have to take the steps to get that in place. it's going to take some time to get a reliable system in place. we can land a metric ton on the surface of mars, that's all we know how to do. that's about the size of a mini cooper car. if we're going to explore mars, it needs to be something bigger than that. there are challenges that we have, we know what the challenges are, but it will take some time to get those technologies ready. >> have you counted up how many breakthroughs you think you need

to get there? >> we ought to talk about it a little bit. i'm not sure they're breakthroughs in a sense. if we can build on what we know now today, and just expangd it. for example life support, we have life support on the station, it works pretty well, it's 85% closed loop. but we need to push it to where it's more reliable, doesn't require more maintenance, we need to look at the ability to print parts. i don't consider those necessarily big breakthroughs, but we have got to get comfortable that this technology is at the maturity level where you're going to use it for this mission where it absolutely, positively has to work. that's where i see the challenges. >> and i think the states are going to allow us to do that, the proving ground that charlie and bill had mentioned, that's the key, we have to take systems from days or months or weeks and turn it into longer durations and we need the time and capability to do that. >> is there something you want to add there? >> i think we have to make sure that every piece of technology

we work on that it's extensable to mars, does it really extend to mars and can we use nit that vision? i don't want to do the demonstrations just for demonstrations takes, i want to be putting systems together that we can actually use for mars. the example is the asteroid redirect mission, the robotic space craft. i have given that to the team for the design condition. the basically architecture that you will use to transport cargo to the visibility of mars. so now we're looking at missions built on using that as a key piece. so orion and sls, we know what capabilities they have -- so we're doing the next life support system for the station, it won't be a life support system for station. it will be the life support system that we plan to put -- it's not a demonstration, let's test this see how it works, nope, we're actually going to take those systems to space and see how they work.

>> what do you see as you work on problems this can change but right now as you look at it what is the hardest problem? is it radiation exposure or something else? >> i think radiation exposure needs some understanding. there's not much we can do unless we put some kind of magnetic shielding in there. we went to the institute of medicine and we asked them to look at our current standards for radiation limits and asked if we can push the limits a little bit. is it ethically acceptable to change those limits that we use for mortality could we change those and alter those and they gave us some considerations to talk got that, so we're pushing not only the technology that help protect the human, but also looking at the requirements we have and are they realistic requirements or is today's medical environment allowed us to do things differently? >> the restrictions themselves,

they might be good restrictive, and astronauts might accept that risk? >> yes, and we have got now basic guidelines from the institute of medicine of what considerations go into that discussion. >> that solves a lot of problems if you change the rules like that. >> we're not totally changing the rules, but we have got the frame work, the point ask we're not looking at a single solution or a single break through, we're looking at a solution to a problem that gets us to where we want to go. >> let's talk about iss for a minute. iss is a proving ground. a lot of people would say budge tarl -- budgetarially it is a drain on the budget. does iss give you more than it takes? >> i believe it does. it forces you to make decisions right up front.

if we make that exploration life support system. i have got a test that i could never test. we could test on the ground and what we learned on the space station, we thought we had the greatest carbon dioxide system in the world. what we found out when we get it we found out on the water system that the tigon tubing is permeable to carbon dioxide, it goes into the water system and creates a nutrients-rich atmosphere for bacteria. and we tested extensively under ground and we saw none of those problems. going to the microgram environment of the space, that tease itted out and pushed those problems, so i think station can give you that chance to really dry run and test the equipment in orbit. but you don't use station as and an ancillary or piece, you pick pieces that are absolutely necessary and you use the unique advantage of the station to do that and some things are better tested on the ground. so you make a smart decision of what you want to do the most

cost effective way to keep moving towards mars. >> if you didn't the station up there, would you be looking for some capability or something like that. >> you would be using considerable resources to get to the station. don't forget the transportation angle as well. we have the means to get to space to demonstrate technologies. the station provides a research platform that already is supplied with crew and propulsion. what we found in some of our space tech demonstrations is to focus on the technology and try to leverage what else is out there. we're focusing time and time again for the same kind of basic needs. >> i think another piece on station the one year implementation we're going to do our crew members next year in 2015. we're very experienced looking out to six months, we don't see anything problematic out beyond six months, even though it still is one data point, it's one data point. we have looked at it before, the russians have flown several

year-long missions. but i think it's time we now look at it with the tools we have got today to see if there's anything in the humeening -- human system that changes over that six-month period, if there's something that's continuing to degrade. >> so how important is it to simulate a mars mission in lower earth orbit that way and how close do you have to make it to a real mars mission to be of value? do you build a communication delay, do you block the windows so they don't have to look at earth? how do you do zien -- design something like that? >> we have talked about that, we do some things now, we're doing a lot of procedures now on board station that are autonomous, where the crews actually do the operation without any ground involvement. the time delay doesn't allow the ground team to interact with the crew. so we're doing those. we have talked about takes away the windows and taking away communication time.

it's interesting -- >> i bet the astronauts love that. >> they don't like that. >> so what's interesting, they say to go to mars, they're willing to put up with all these stresers in their life. right, but just to go it for fun, as a test mission, they're not so keen about that. so that's an interesting human dynamic already. it's almost, with the marathon yesterday, how many marathons do you have to run before you're really ready too go the a marathon, or are you good enough to run 10 mile ors 18 miles and then you're ready to go do the marathon. so i think the trick with mars is to not do so much. we will not reduce all the risk to zero, but to reduce the risk to a low enough level that we're ready to give this a shot, but it will not be risk free on that first mission. >> among your challenges, i can see the psychological issues as one of the issues. i mean, the mars 500 experience and what they have done, they have tried to delve into this.

but there's some big challenges there. >> i think that we have got some good studies, again on the behavioral aspect. the dimension is really different. if you look at our crews on station, they spend a lot of time looking at the home planet and taking pictures. from's a real tie between the human and where you are. but then when that plaechbt, we have got pictures of the rover taking picture of the earth, and the earth is one star among many. that's a different psychological push. but i think that's important too in the way we talk about this, we talk about moving humans into deep space. i'm trying to change the discussion a little bit. we talk about it as exploration, when i think about exploration, i think about going, investigating and then coming back. i think we need to start talking about in terms of maybe pioneering, where we're actually going to potentially stay.

we want to have the infrastructure there and think about it as moving human presence off of earth and into the solar system. >> building the capabilities that are extensible as we go to mars. >> i always think about history here being a history major you think about the voyages of magellan. frankly, somebody going to mars will have more contact with earth or the home port, if you will, to use the analogy. do you use those historical parallels as you inform decisions about how to handle this. >> we have to discuss the differences when you do terrestrial big voyages you have oxygen to breathe and water you can drink. you can bring some food with you when you got to wherever you were going you could grow plants. when we start becoming in the charts i say mars ready or earth

independent when we start breaking that tie back to the planet that is a different dimension. you have to carry with you or have enough assurance that you can use the carbon dioxide environment of mars to generate oxygen. can you get water out of the martian environment. you have to prove some of the things that are there. terrestrial exploration was different because it wasn't quite the level of here where you are putting a human in an environment where the human cannot live alone. >> by the way, if you have questions feel free to come to the microphones and we will include questions in this conversation. how much of the ability to live off the martian land do we have to prove before we put people on the surface you think? >> there have been a number of studies that show if you can do institute resource utilization

which is if you can get oxygen you can get water and fuel and air to breathe that show the amount of mass, how much do you have to take with you and how much can you rely on when you get there. one would argue if we are going to rely on a system you would want it to be there ahead of time and be reliable and able to store the oxygen so you know it is there. i think that would be the most prudent step to do. we are taking the first step here in mars 2020. >> that would be advanced mission, multiple landings where these autonomous vehicles would create at least prove it if not create a store. >> one advantage maybe we have is we can send scout missions ahead of time that early explorers didn't have that capability. as bill points out the environment is so harsh and so extreme. >> again, the idea is that when you put those scout vehicles there they ought to be generating resources to use when the crew mission follows. i think in this constrained

environment we have to make sure everything we do is extensible to the next step, that we are not just doing a demonstration of oxygen right out of the martian atmosphere. if we are going to build oxygen i want to build enough that can be used and play forward in another scenario. >> as you paint that picture i think you have done a nice job of pulling together these elements in a way that provides a cohesive narrative. i hope that plays well on capitol hill as you are trying to sell this program. what is interesting about it, it is kind of like we all think of success in space as apollo. there was a deadline and commitment and cold war and these things lined up. we perceived that the way to go to space. if you don't set a date and go and be there by then that is a failure. this is a little more like building the interstate system. there is a sense of let's build infrastructure out there. it doesn't have the same

headline capability, if you will, that the space race had. what it offers is sustainability. i guess a long way to be saying this is a nuance story. how can we convey that story to people who are less dialled into what nasa is doing right now? or is that my job? >> that's your job. i would say it is really all of our jobs. we need to look at what we are doing today and then describe it in a way that really makes sense. we just flew up on space x this plants in space. we have grown a bunch of plants before. this is the first time we are growing plants for the crew to eat. this is not for a science experiment to see how the plant will grow. this is actually food for the crew to augment their diet. this is the beginning of starting to push us off of the

earth into space to do things. it is a small thing but we ought to be talking about it. >> it is a big thing. if you can 3 d print a pizza they would be really happy. >> titanium pizzas are tough to chew on. >> roughage. >> it's tough to be out there. i think you really did hit the nail on the head in terms of that. i get the excitement, too, i want to get one mission, create a mission patch. i don't think we have the luxury to do that right now with budgets and forecasts and where we are. we still can get there. i think we have to take successes and the steps along the way whether it is growing plants, solar electric propulsion, better eva suits, better landing systems. we are moving the needle forward we will need to paint it in the right context with as few powerpoint charts as we can. that is the key.

>> you had three charts but one was like five charts in one. you know, you get the sense that if you talk about it long enough maybe it could become a reality. we have the fundamental issue of dollars and cents here. if you take that vision, that narrative and you jive it with what the money is right now, when do we get to mars? as somebody said last night it will be 20 to 30 years but we have been saying that for 20 to 30 years. if you do the math on that i don't think we ever get there. how do you reconcile that vision with what congress and the american people have put on the table for nasa? >> you know, i think, again, the way i kind of lay it out and i have talked about it last week is we cannot do it at the same budget level we are at today. this is just not going to work. and the current budget has a 1%

increase. it will need more than that. i think it is a modest increase. we need to show congress and folks here is the advances we can make and the pieces that are there. and show how we are not just doing a demonstration but this piece fits into the mars capability puzzle this way. if we make that maybe we can continue to break that paradigm and get additional funding to move forward. we need to look hard at what we can do internationally. can we leverage off of their work and the private sector. there's a lot there with cargo and crew going to station, but can we extend that into the exploration domain and kind of extend that into the industry. >> one thing that bill had in his charts, one thing that is a little bit different than perhaps the past is you see the mission director, the corps

working together. we have work that's going to mars on a size mission director, that feeding forward into what we're going to do for explore ration. the work we're doing for the big customer working together to get technologies feeding into the missions. on our side this is kind of the down and dirty of it, we are trying to work with other partners on the technology pieces that will feed into it. it is going to be a story to tell but we can work on the technology pieces and leverage other investments. that is the key, i think. >> it is going to be hard. the first chart it all looks good when we are all working together. to do that you are giving up control. i am going to be doing more than the science mission director would like to do on mars. i would like to look at entry, desint and landing. if we do two separate missions the cost of that is some larger number. if we can integrate those and be willing to give up i don't get

the perfect human mission and the perfect science mission but by together we are advancing humans into the solar system that is how we win. so we have to figure out a way. we don't look at it from each of our stove pipes but a way we can work together to go do this. the challenge is big enough. it's not going to be solved by any mission director by itself. it will be the whole of the agency pulled together and the whole of the international community pulling together. >> i would think getting to mars would be easier than getting nasa aas working together. don't you think? >> i don't know about that. >> you're not going to go there, are you? >> i got a question in here. say who you are, please. >> thanks. steve brody from isu international space university. throughout my time at nasa and i'm sure yours, as well, there is occasional wildcards that

help you along and sometimes present additional challenges. ñ thing i'm1w#$g thinking a the infusion and/or offer of significant private resources from some individuals of very deep pockets. we have had now the very real win/win with commercial cargo and hopefully that will continue with the commercial crew. how do you see -- do you see either through conversations you have had or since what it out there any major contributions from either individuals, companies or whatever that will really get that principle and give you more than what you've got now for the program ahead? >> i would say, again, just think we need to definitely look at this. we see a lot of folks working on

engine technology which is interesting to me. there are folks. space x signed an agreement to look at locksmithing, engine work down at stennis. whereas that has been the domain of the government to work on new engine capabilities some of that is being picked up by the private sector with private sector money. we need to watch for those pieces and move forward. we deinteresting things on space station with the system that takes carbon dioxide from the carbon dioxide removal system and combines with waste hydrogen and generates oxygen and creates methane as a waste gas. instead of buying that as a system we just agreed to pay for the water that was generated by the device. we went to industry and said we will pay you $10,000 roughly per

pound for water generated on station. if you generate water you will get paid. they were able to do development up front. are there other models where we can leverage off of the private sector and find things that they want that benefit us? we have to continue to look at that and just don't assume that it has to always be the government doing these activities. >> another thing i add from the technology standpoint a similar story. when we see interest in high power solar electric propulsion for future exploration for moving the asteroid but we see interest in the commercial space raft industry. can we leverage that interest. optical communications that has incredible benefits not only for the next generation of teachers but for other government agencies that we won't speak about here but it has interest in the cable operators and cable

satellites and getting content up to the satellites. can we leverage that interest. >> what is the right mix on that? can we get to mars leveraging private sector ingenuity. >> i think some things like green propellant in replacement of hydrogen there are commonalities. entry dissent and landing is perhaps a little unique. >> hard to sell that to an auto maker. >> even in low earth orbit i don't envision another government space station. i see the private sector picking up the next generation of space station in low earth orbit and they will do that to generate

products that they learn. i see our space station today as a chance to experiment with what might be helpful in the pharmaceutical world and drug world that they can see there is something here that microgravity environment gives me a different insight into physical process. we have enabled transportation through cargo and crew so it is not cost prohibitive for them to get there. they can work with companies talking about building laboratories in space and maybe a single purpose laboratory now as a research environment. that is creating a private sector infrastructure we can use and we don't have to replicate any of that in future plans. i am hoping that we use station to be that next piece. this extension of station gives us a fighting chance to expose a broader community beyond aero space. >> having another ten years of

station was huge. is it enough time for you? you are talking a long timeframe for what you want to accomplish here. ten years from now would you be wishing you had it there? you use what you can. >> i use what i can. it really changed the environment for the commercial sector. when they thought station was going to end in 2020 i couldn't get commercial company to think about doing space based research. the focus was too short. the stability wasn't there. but just that change of four more years from 2020 to 2024 has really changed the commercial sector's perception of what space is and how to use space. the fact we are doing cargo flights they can get private services to take cargo up. eventually we will have crew. they are starting to see this isn't such a foreign environment to us. we are willing to invest. going back to the question asked

when the tipping point changes where private sector doesn't see something so risky they see they can start turning profit or using resources in space then i think you start seeing a much broader base to build the kind of things we need to go forward. >> it was hard to gain the confidence of the commercial sector and academic world after all that happened when the science budgets were cut. >> they were slowly getting that back again. again, they are skeptical and it is the stability thing. as you talked about before being sustainable and building plants and processes that take the storms that come when we have a sequester and the whole program doesn't fall apart and we get an administration change. if we have plan that is making measured sustainable progress i think that is how we ultimately get to mars. >> we have a question over here. >> i am from george washington university. my question has to do with the slide shown twice now regarding

proving ground missions. those are beyond low earth orbit and it said 1 to 12 months. i am interested from the bio medical challenges. is it a proving ground mission of 6 to 12 months? >> what we are ink thing about in the lunar space in the vicinity around the moon looking at a crew tended capability. i don't see that as a moon habitation module but it would be the habitation module we would potentiallypf&l use on a class mission. the idea is to take the life support system that we worked on space station and put it into a crew tended space station and stick it around the moon that enables a lot of lunar activity and a lot of interest in the international community about lunar systems activity.

you can get to the north pole of the moon. we can look at how to deploy antennas on the far side of the moon. you can do that from this crew tended facility in deep space. the other thing if you think about it is we talked about pre-positioning hardware around mars. so you will launch a component with a life support system. it spends a year to get out there now. it is in the martian environment and doesn't get activated for another year. sometimes our systems are not so good just sitting around. this proving ground lets us put a laboratory around the moon and where we visit it every couple of months it looks at how we shut the system down and reactivate it. it is being judged by how it helps us. >> if you had the druthers in the perfect world with unlimited money would it help you to land on the moon or a detour that just would kind of suck

resources, time, whatever? å! the challenge there, of course, is it doesn't have much of an atmosphere. so that landing piece doesn't play out. it would be chemical. i'm not sure from that aspect -- >> as the president said been there, done that? >> i would say not quite so much. somebody asked about partial gravity. that is the advantage of the moon. by being on the surface of the moon you get to see the human body now in partial gravity environment. >> can you inturpulate to mars? >> i think you can. they would like to get data there. we have small centrifuges where we can look at things on the cellular level. i think that will give some indication of is there a problem in this intermediate gravity level. i don't think it is worth the expense right now of going to

the moon to get that partial gravity condition. i believe we can get that with station. unless we see some huge problem. >> the other thing i offer there are certain capabilities and learning to live on the surface and telerobotics. there are private partnerships and organizations that are also interested in the moon. there are ways perhaps we can partner to do that. >> another piece has been in the proving ground region if our international partners want to go to the surface of the moon great let them do that. if commercial industry sees the advantage of using some lunar materials for certain activities that is fine. we will support that. then our focus is going beyond. we don't have to do everything for ourselves but should be aware of the environment we are in and leverage off other activities to help us get to where we are heading towards mars. >> we figured out a way to partner with the chinese? >> i think the chinese will be a key player.

i can't imagine at some point we don't work with the chinese. >> should we partner with the chinese? >> i can't answer that. i will be teleported to mars momentarily if i offer real answers. >> my name is greg cecil. i am a former space shuttle worker and now a middle school science teacher in florida. my question is that constuilation was set up by the bush administration to take us to moon and mars and beyond. when the new administration came in that was cancelled. my greatest fear is now that you have an idea of what you want to do and a road map set up with sls if you have a new administration coming to power in 2016-2017 will we have everything scratched again and starting from base zero? has nasa considered that and

worried about that? >> i would say we are really working as fast as we can on both orion and sls. you will get to see an orion test flight at the end of this year in december. that's essentially 80% of the software we will fly around the moon. that is a big plus. the first dome for the exploration mission one in 2017 is actually manufactured down in new orleans. we are putting in a large machine and will start building the tanks down there. we are working on the exploration upper stage for mars class missions. by the time we get into 2016 i will have significant hardware that you can go out and touch and see. it is not mission destination specific. what we are doing by going to lunar space if someone decides to do lunar activities we can do lunar activities but focused towards mars. we are trying to stay

destination independent but more capability driven and try to make that point to the next group that comes in with an idea. we understand what you would like to do and put your fingerprint on this vision and create enough flexibility to change the vision a little bit but don't lose the ultimate goal of where we are going. sustainability is absolutely critical. >> how much metal do you have to bend? how many congressally linked jobs do you have to have before you have enough inersha? >> i can't answer that. >> why can't we do space -- >> we also do ourselves a big disservice because we kind of argue with ourselves about the perfect plan. at some point that is not helpful to us. the problem is that the outside world sees these supposed smart

people arguing so there must be something that isn't right. so then they kind of go we don't want to do that. we need to make sure that we don't get so caught up in trying to find the absolute perfect plan that meets everything that it doesn't sustain itself. can we get together and recognize sustainability is important? >> question over here. >> harry finger, going back to the origin of nasa and its predecessor, in fact, and also as head of the joint office of nasa and the atomic energy commission where we developed the nuclear thermal rocket propulsion and in 1970 we were ready to really move forward talking about human mars missions. i heard no word of the thermal propulsion at all here and i haven't heard of it in anything.

we really had it. president nixon at that time killed that program and several others in the space program. we haven't given rebirth to that. but we really were ready to move forward with a mars mission at that time. we are talking now over 40 years later. what consideration has been given to nuclear thermal rocket propulsion that we already had developed then and could move on that high thrust? you mentioned nuclear electric which is certainly very good but it is a low thrust system that takes longer for mission. >> well, i think we are still living on the shoulders of giants. you are one of those giants because many of the technologies and capabilities we have were either proven out -- every time

they come up with a new system i ask if it was done in the '60s. here is the test data every time. >> it has all been done. >> nuclear thermal was really pushed forward in a significant way in the '70s. i think most of the trade studies we see to go to mars including the ones that we have in space tech say nuclear thermal is probably the best means we have to get there as quick as we can. as quick as we can, helps with the crew and radiation. so it a question of investment, priority and when to invest and how much to invest and when you do it. we have modest investments in nuclear thermal. we kind of tried to make sure we are not overlapping. there is modest investments there to keep the system alive. when we can get the right budget and the right time many would argue that is the way to go. >> i think it was unfortunate

the fukushima engine. wasn't that a bad idea? >> frankly, i just don't see we are going to get there even in 30 years where it is going. when you say 30 years i think we were doing it in 1970. >> there are some trades that argue in cryoogenic propulsion that if under certain conditions the planets are under the right alignment you can do it. to get there regularly we have to get back to that. >> so we are a little short of time. if i can ask you to get right to your question so we can get a few more in i would appreciate it. >> you guys are coming a long way in some of the answers i have seen have been very good, kind of music to my ears asq2zé as working with the private sector. there is still learning that needs to occur maybe not so much

at nasa but the hill as to the fact that the private sector is going to maybe be starting slow but going faster and faster and faster. there will be times where they get ahead of you. you can see some billionaires pool together and do a mars mission that might start to go faster. wouldn't it be a good idea to have sort of an annual review where nasa and leaders of private sectors sit down and talk about and coordinate these things because it is going to happen and get faster and faster and faster. you might land there second. >> that sounds like a reasonable thing to think about. i think again kind of back to the other discussions we have to make sure we are not just talking to ourselves all the time. i think to your point we need to look and say maybe we need to talk about these things to a broader community, expose them to what we can do and have them tell us what they can do.

the private sector can take more risks. they have significant investment funds. what are they interested in? where would they like to go? it might be helpful to have a broader forum or expand this human to mars work shop to include a broader community. >> if you get there second you still need to make it look like a victory. >> quick question, please. >> excellent point from the gentleman who brought up the alternative of nuclear thermal propulsion. why is there so much of a focus on solar electric propulsion? >> the focus on solar electric is a couple fold. for the asteroid retrieval mission where we can operate in deep space has the capability, the most efficient form of transportation in space. we think about transportation on earth we have tugs, barges, fast vehicles and slow. we think it is ready for the

next step. we can leverage industry. it is good for multiple purposes, the next one that we can just push over the needle. look at the national research council came out with the road map, high priority. if you look at most of the trade studies it enables exploration. >> i think a big piece is what mike was pulling on is it has more application than just to nasa and just our mission. to get high power solar rays is important to the communication satellite industry. they are going to be pushing this technology so it is us and then pushing so it is not just nasa pushing this for our own needs. the other piece is the electric propulsion piece on communication satellites, commercial industry is interested in that piece. this is a way to leverage off of what commercial is doing and moving forward in a nuclear thermal propulsion area is pretty much us alone pushing.

there isn't quite yet another private sector application for that class of rocket. we need to keep investing in the technology and take the work done in the 60s and take it to the next step. we know a lot more about control systems now. computers are much more sophisticated. we can move it forward and then expose that. i think our focus is along the lines of sustainability. this is something that is uniquely needed for us. it can be shared. >> i think that is a key aspect. this is not trying to do it all ourselves and trying to be smart about it. one of the challenges for nuclear thermal is the ability to store liquid hydrogen. we are working that now. not only good for cryoogenic storage and transfer. we are trying to take the common pieces and trends and do it right now today. >> i have several questions, but

we have a break coming up and people can be thinking about them. in relation to doing things in the past and then kind of putting them on the shelf, it reminds me of the hl-20 derived from the bor 4 photographed. a lot of wind tunnel tests and it was part of a program. and it was put on the shelf. jim benson bought it and now mark serangelo is doing it again. i'm just wondering if inflatables was a program at one time and now it's back in another program developed by las vegas, bigalo. several days ago we had a giant

us, john hoopolt. he was a great role model for me. i hope some of the thoughts i come up with can in some way mimic what he has been able to do. at the moon we had a free return trajectory. and we modified that once the sps was working we were always in a relatively close lunar earth orbit. and apollo 13 indicated that we can probably come back. i don't believe we have that capability in the trans mars injection with the fly by free return that is an acceptable solution nor do we have a rescue ability. why don't we do like many other industries do?

instead of one big large thing that can fail, why don't we have two small things like fighter airplanes that fly in formation if one can't do the job the other one can? sure you can do them but leave staging orbit at 5 mile formation difference or 10 mile. don't be so stupid, why don't you put them together in the staging orbit and have them fly out and now you can jet us in the one that fails and continue to do the job if you have two crew modules? on the subject of crew modules, can orion aero brake into mars orbit? does it have the capability of doing that? when i looked at what i need at mars i need landers. and landers are cable of aero

braking and transporting people from one position to another to bringing back people. i don't know who is here from lockheed but i have to ask the question, why do we need orion i really don't believe that that's the case. i may have had another question. well, i guess we did have the idea of wanting to have a launch vehicle and then a larger habitat. once we have the larger habitat we can put the people in the launch vehicle. why can't we put them into the large vehicle and a lander vehicle just as well as in orion? let me leave it at that.

>> i suppose yes or no is not an option. >> we can try. i would say first of all on expandable we will look at that on space station with beam in 2015 we are going to look at expandable technology to see what advantages that gives to us. we will get a chance to see it is reported to have better thermal conditions. it is the larger volume allows you to put larger volume in for shielder and radiation. we will get real world experience with expandables. we are looking call it evolvable and modular architecture for mars. it is along the lines of what buzz is talking about. maybe multiple habitation modules. we may preposition ahead of time and we do the rendezvous on the return vehicle. you may preposition your return vehicle at mars and then come back. instead of looking at a single

monolithic mission we are looking at evolvable where it can -- we build pieces and position pieces up front and then call it modular because we are trying to use similar components. we are starting to look at those things. very interesting pieces can we take advantage of the natural satellites around mars and use those in the architecture and use a piece of those for what we are trying to do. we are looking at earth orbit transfers so we are not into gravity well and looking at cycler stuff. classic missions were more apollo style where we launched everything in a campaign within a year and spent the armada of space craft that you saw towards mars. i think we will do that over a period of time over a period of years and build more evolvable piece. we need all of us to start thinking maybe in a different

way. it's not a single mission but it really is a pioneering aspect of how to move human presence in. once the mental change starts then you invest in some things that might take actually longer to go do but may be more sustainable. we are looking at many of these things. >> last word. >> i think if you look at mars we will get there in a sustainable and affordable way. we know technology is important and that is why we have investments underway and we continue to make investments over the next 18 months in a number of key areas. >> gentlemen, thank you very much. great talk. enjoyed speaking with you. thanks for your attention. our special presentation of the mars summit of george washington university continues. according to nasa chief scientist research has proven that mars was at one time hospitalable to life. he discusses this and other

revelations learned during robotic missions to the red planet. this is about 35 minutes. plane. this is 35 minutes. [ applause ]. >> thanks. thank you very much. can everyone hear me? thank you very much.thank i want to take you on a tour t really kind of like the icelandic sagas of what the dof science discoveries from mars especially in the last 14 years of our program of exploration ff known as the mars exploration program, which is implemented at our jet propulsion lab has given us.en 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,g nasa centers and private industry are really the impetus for human exploration of this planet. and many of us have been workine these missions all the way back to viking, believe this.ll and i hope i can give you that sense.i can i want to remind you of where we are.mind we are a long way today from w

mars, even though we're in a very close approach geometry in right now. very good for telecommunication. and it's really, really striking, and i reminded our administrator of this about 15 , years ago, that mars is not our mother earth. it's a profoundly different world. our it does not, as ed wiler would say, does not read our textbooks.s one 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 orbiter, the landscape is changing. we don't totally know what we have. that's important as we look 't forward to the era of human . exploration. in fact, mars is an n ever-changing frontier. we're just realizing the he questions we have to ask to allow us as aware human explorers to do the job we can w do. situational awareness. this is just a view we see of where we're going with curiosity

over the next 100s of souls and literally as we drive every day, we see elements of the new mars the same with opportunity, spirit, all the way back to viking.so paint let me paint that picture for you by reminding you that science organizes itself in different ways. for the last almost 20 years, w, we've looked at mars science thematically, through four th primary themes. obviously, we'd like to know whether we're alone in this universe. this is a profound question.proo goes back farther than we can even record in history f.y. but getting at the question of f life, active biological systems, were there ever there, could ree they be there,re is a really toe question. it actually took humanity a long time on earth to understand the past record of life on our planet.ory on even sometimes the extent level of life. that was a joke. but anyway, so, to get at the e 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 e pages in stone that don't lie s but are not always available to us.e and through the preparation for having us be there to make these discoveries. so, we've organized our program through these themes following different threads, understanding the role of water., mars mars is a water planet. we know that now. know understanding whether there's hs places that if they were here on earth could be inhabited by organisms.eseea and finally, understanding what the signs of life are. more profoundly now, could they be preserved?d if theyth were there and they'r not preserved, because they can't be, what good does that do us?h we need to parse those through our program. so what we've done for the lastt 14 years with the restructured r program that some of us were sos fortunate to work on was develoo a robotic science exploration program. every step is driven by confess we've had, high thos thesis we're testing, things about mars we want to know to get at those themes. in many ways enhanced by

technologies, new approaches, new measurements. the mars we've seen during the course of this program, as you see all the way back to around 2000 all the way to present and moving forward s about questions, measurements, approaches, vantage points. the same way we people would e e attack programs in science.sciee so, this is all about s.t.e.m. it puts together the engineering, the science questions, the math and the quei technology to solve problems. we've been doing that remarkably effective. our batting average is literally 1,000.iterally many teams in major league baseball would love to have it. booef done that very well since this program came about. it's a partnership with engineering.th so, i want you to understand, we can't do all of this without engineers helping us do that.th and the factfa that many of the missions survive today, way beyond design life, opportunityt being a good example, is really testament to that. let me 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 rsg much better than i with more elt time. tha but, let me try to do that.n first, let me remind you the mars we see is rather firs foreboding. it's not really waiting for us. it's extremely cold. oxidizing, can't breathe the air, lost its magnetic field, g don't understand why the surface is covered with, you know, large deposits of dust that are very e 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.uld scientifically, though, it is. t and we've learned that since the first voyages of the '60s and into the viking era that it really is impressive.rsimpres it's what we see and what we get are really, if you will, a little bit of a misnomer for what mars has done. so, we have to look at the marsb today and project back in time to a planet that really, we

think, records in its record books some things that really so actually help us understand our planet earth. l so let's look at it. mars has an extremely rarefied atmosphere today. in fact, we've often talked at about the temperature at our toes versus, for a short guy te like me n my head would go through gradient of tense of degrees. difficult to do here on earth, common on mars.u the kinds of surface liquid rfdr water we like here on earth rth necessary for the kind of microbial life that's rampant, can't exist today. water in that state is it at least 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 i the minerals and the landscapes pretty much wherever we look is there. we've learned that. so if someone says we discovered water on mars, well, we kind of knew that. thank you.

the question is, what does that mean? how much was there? where did it go? how would that have affected thd geological history, the eternale evolution, the climate and the looking for signs of life? many of us believe that the marh we see today at one point where reflected a history where water was a prominent surface feature, lakes and seas if not oceans covered the lowlands. point by the way, o i should point ous the reason we can do this kind 0 of stud is because way back in e the '90s we had the forethought of the fine-scale topography and the character of the landscape so we can a literally flood mars and i 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.cour so, we flood mars.sense. and the lowlands and the northern plains, often covered d with dust. p here's the north polar ice cap. large basins, the biggest impact

site we've discovered in the solar system.over these areas would have been under water. we actually see landscapes that would have shown the signs geomorfhically that tell us this may have been the case. we're still looking for the ele, 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 that. fon ofrlieste think we do.es and we look back in time to the earliest times of our planet, mg coming out of late/heavy bombardment. the planet became inhabitable be the single cell world, pre-rna i world, into the world we know o. with primitive dna, a few billion years ago. that's recorded in the rock le records, things got a little better in terms of the atmosphere and the more complicated organisms that leading up to these big dudes, us, came about.th that's where we think we know very simplistically on earth. on the question is we see records of these things recorded in thei rock record on our planet, whicr is extremely dynamic.well,

the question is, well, could co this have happened on mars and l could it have been preserved? this is a key question.how 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 tod his ine 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 n our team at jpl. we put together a mars exploration program driven by science with a strategy that said, well, first we'll do the reconnaissance. where do you go? tg it's a big planet. 150 million square kilometers. you can't go everywhere.e so, let's understand where the action is from orbit.und let's land where the action is and move around as if we were there. sort of apollo without the astronauts with reasonably smare robots and then eventually get t to a point where we can do analysis and return stuff from

mars to earth.an fro by the way, while we were doingn this we realized that there are meteorites delivered to us from mars rather favorably by mother nature.tem we can also study and put that together to understand the planet and we have been bee remarkably successful.e since the orbiters known as odyssey and through two rovers like spirit and opportunity, landers like phoenix and currently curiosity and moving on to maven, which is on the way, we have really rewritten the textbooks.kids of the kids of 2000, the young s millennial s.t.e.m.ers would see a new mars in their textbooks in 2014. things we didn't know about the magnetic field back then. som but these are just some of the balls reflecting the data sets we produced. some of them have huge science value. the remanent magnetic field telling us mars did have, we gnc think, an internal dynamo. the topography which is good enough to land things on as welg as to follow the water. understanding of the minerals o

and context of dust.ll the character thermally of the planet.ntext we have seen a diverse planet sa 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 electromagnetic radiation to see the planet. we actually have a mini mars observing system in place now on the surface in orbit to study ot this world, this fourth planet. and some of them tell us about the character of what the f surface is like compositionally. others tell us about the ot character at the scale we would walk on. by the way, i love to tell this story, when we first put put together the road map to have cameras that could see things the size of baech ball on the planet, many colleagues said, you know, we don't need that.ma golly gee, why would someone want to see those things?bu engineers kind of did want it, i must add. but lot of scientists said let's do other things.stder 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 withe where we are. help so, what did we learn from all this? e wee wed to see exposures at the scale. we could imagine ourselves exploring. relationships between rock ouxpo layers that tell us of the ri th history of water and wind evolved on the surface and evend the detail to pick places to got and so we went from an era of fs first landing viking -- this is viking ii in september of '76. there's the flag, of course, color balanced, although mars atmosphere is not quite so blue. amazing sight. the project of landing safely is this boulder field was probably0 about 40% to 50%.ow we didn't know it was a boulder field and so we landed anyway.fi pretty heroic.eroic. we landed then with new delivery systems with the air bag assisted pathfinder, moving on

to the era of the rovers which o basically gave our program the c vision at the surface to ask the tough questions that begot h 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, super oxidants, nothing would survive that that would be related to modern biology. transitioning into the rock w world mars that we saw with pathfinder. into the history of water world. we saw and still see with the w mars exploration rover such as a opportunity, 36-plus kilometers and driving into this world than we're now probing with new d tha instruments with curiosity. so, what have we learned?curi a lot.learn and we still have not assembled the jigsaw puzzle.zzle. mars has lots of interesting variations and composition. st t storms, active surface change on hourly scales, dust v avalanches.

a magnetic field. that volcanism that could have been more active than we thought. explosive faces.all impact craters that expose the surface like natural drill rigs. all this together with areas where we've actually seen the water.thac our there's a little trench from our phoenix scout mission in 2007-08. we have seen sub surface layering with radars that have been partnered with italy to show us the way that climate tr record on mars is put together. all this paints a picture for a planet that is really profoundly interesting, alluring and compelling to get ourselves there.pr but, wait, there's still -- there's still problems. first, on our nice convenient ie earth we have mother nature's natural force field with our great magnetic field protecting us from all that nasty stuff. that bill and mike talked aboutr that you'd experience if you left the protective sheath of

our protective maggotic field. mars does not obviously have bumps on it, it has relic magnetic signatures. we discovered from mars global survey or magnetic electron experiment. and we think then that mars inside versus earth is very different.s we're a dynamic planet exchanging energy from the plant inside/out with dynamically ng g rotating core.cally indugs an electromagnetic fieldl producing all this cool stuff,h compasses work, all this. mars, that story changed. maybe it wasn't quite big enough to retain the convective energy to do that. we're still working on that. there's new missions we want to fly. 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 a mars. the things you see here in terma of all these strange names of mineral phases and stuff i won'f go through them ad nauseam with you, but every one of them has a bearing on how you record the history of water and sediments

that could preserve potentially the history of life.rv if it is preserved as organic chemicals -- i should say -- nic yeah, organic chemistry, we've seen all these things since we began our program in 2000. this 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.e to be able to go to the place with chlorides that might preserve records of life.with we see cloer i'd deposits on earth in super cold, dry deserts that actually preserve microorganisms. why not on mars?n these become questions for biologists not geologists like myself. but we've also been able to organize the landscapes of mars in time.le from the early time we call preranacian, before the floods, all the way to the present through the different landscapes we've measured from orbit with these powerful reconnaissance steps.

we put it in there in 2000 against many colleagues saying, do you really want that, to giv us the vision to be able to do this.eall this is a record book like the geologists like hutton and smitd put together in the 19th century for earth. we've done that. we have fossil river deltas on mars imagine what the mississippi river delta would look like, you know, in 10 million years.tas on places that reflect the layerint history of the role of water and wind working together and we'vee 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 ll basically about the shallow interior of the planet as it is affected by the exogenic world of space. our planet sbing hit by these. you all remember chablinski

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. and some of the bigger ones excavate craters the size of football stadiums, to you know,z small cities and they expose the shallow subsurface. and we're realizing that's important.ey what you see on the surface is s not always what you want to see when you measure things on marso about some of these very tough questions we're asking. we're a little far there. we're also -- we've also we discovered that mars has gone through major changes in the way its geology is reflected in the rocks fromfr the time it was y weather -- this is a paper by banfield and others, when it was wetter and the kind of volcanos were erupted that were explosive, st. helens, even raiy year when it comes, to the kind that are oozing lava.

this is a very important step. we have also seen with our marso exploration rovers an amazing history of water in the rocks as two different sites, thousands of kilometers apart.nt this is something we had not anticipated. of course, we renamed things. blueberries and newberries in different sites. we saw rocks made maybe by volcanism impact. and then we transitions., we when we l re-began this programn 2001, we looked at the idea of putting the best instrumentatioe with the most powerful vantage point we could get on the and surface, we did that through a mission known as the mars science laboratory today with theif rover called curiosity an this behomoth the size of a mini cooper or vw bus carries with i 14 different experiments including ones that deal with ss weather andis radiation, for decent images, for chemistry ine different ways and she's 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 owne little self-portrait, which is an interesting piece of engineering, to using an arm and photography a selfie with 51 frames, but good job curiosity to the measurements we've made by not actually touching rocks. a partnership with france.rance. to the instrument known as sam that can actually measure thing on mars as good as the labs thas measured the rocks that buzz brought back from the moon, we o 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 actuallyd see that we contaminated aspects 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.ho 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, eveo though she sometimes moves at the pace of a giant tortoise isn an amazing feat.in she is seeing things to me as aa geologist are spectacular. these conglomerated rocks with bits of rocks made of other rocks is what we expect to see when streams and rivers leave deposit that are then baked into stone. this is gio one.depo here it is on mars, telling us gio one worked on mars. that's good. water flowed. shallow water.wate we now know what it was made of. we've drilled mars.wat w hol yes, 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 masse speck tromgr ter, gas chrome gra system, a lot of words for a go really cool set of hardware developed at godard and france

that allows us to measure exactly what made the stuff yout see here. you can see the surface materials we excavated are not the classic brown red or red color of mars that is almost brown.hat what we discovered on marches in 600 days of work, there are environments that would be habitable in they were on earth. the buildup of the kind of hew d chemistry we know and love, this is the classic elemental stuff we need for life to do its the thing.o there was probably water there. the minerals and oxidation here. suggest there was energy. the kind of energy some microorganisms even 3 billion gy years ago used on earth. 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 therend?taon ques that's the challenge we face with curiosity and beyond. one of the other things we did,e not even imagined when we launched the mission.m we took that rover with its mass spectrometer and we were able to use it not only to measure whatl stuff is made of and how it goty there but by using clever

chemistry, our team at cal tech and at godard was able to as measure the absolute age of rocks. this was a huge goal for mars as early as 2000. ba we now did it on mars as really a side bar to what we were trying to do.e we also measured the surface exposure age. this is really important. old,e the rocks are really old, older than any rock on earth, like the lunar rocks, they've only been exposed for a few ten of millions of years. and what we see in those rocks exposed is very important.expos because we now know from new law work that's been done around our community on this mission that the space radiation, that nasty stuff that we were talking abouh earlier today, destroys organic molecules. if you sit them there for tens of millions of years, they won's look organic.molecu you won't know youle found the o stuff you're looking for.e havet so, we have to be more creative and clever. we think we understand that thet materials that are buried deeper relative to these little hills are protected from space from radiation relative to those that are constantly being scavenged

by the wind. to so if you're trying to find organic monthly kuls, that's what these little cartoons are, you can't o look out on a nice, smooth parking lot. they'll be baked by radiation el for tens of millions of years. you have to go into places whery they're either exposed or more protected. this will be important for humar explorers to understand that when we start exploring ourselves. so the mars we see today is kind of like the badlands of the american southwest, mongolia, kazakhstan, really rather telling layered rocks. we love them. this is mt. sharp, this is an sh artist rendering of the what the ancient mars could have been like. the measurements we made of enta these isotopes of key elements from paul's experiment with his team, suggests that we can hereo possibly understand thef earli atmosphere of mars to be a window into whether it could have been inhabitable. is there a record of past life?

we've done that. so, the mars we see, this is it, you know, doesn't look like beach front terrain today, is n really a challenging terrain. we've actually seen wheel wear on our rovers.ar o we've driven across it for more than 6 kilometers.we kno 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. and our science team on curiosity and in the mars our st program is trying to understand that. was it a long period? was it a short blip?ders did it cycle? carl seguin in much better he language than i about the cycling nature of climate on fors. was an attempt at humor at t ina lunchtime. forgive me, not funny.ny but in any event, we don't know. we have more measurements to make. that's why the robotic program,b the science push for human ot exploration to open our window, our eyes to the windows are so important.e now, i have to show one bit of humor. of we found some interesting rocks on mars that one of our

scientists found.e loo looks a lot like mummified seals you see in the arctic. your imagination can take you wherever you want.they'v 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 ts 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. it's certainly in gale crater from curiosity. obviously with opportunity and y evidence in gusef crater. from steve sprier's mission. we're still looking for this one.e st this is elusive.s up to connecting these things up to there and maybe it will take wee this, maybe we'll get so far and then it will take the humans, but this record of potential biology, particularly the recory of past life which we think will be a better hypothesis to test w scientifically is really ter important. is so, we've made great progress.r. the real question then is how w

can we use this bow wave of bow science, this era of almost renaissance-like discoveries with a large science community,e literally more than 1,000 scientists across universities and other institutions are s working mars now. we've built up that community internationally.tutiin how can we use that to ensure the sustainment of this n ques questioning regimeti to transitn into human exploration? so, i leave you in the next five minutes with my final thoughts. first, unfortunately it's not uo easy. we've all heard mars is hard spoken in different languages. hard and whatever.lang but, you know, we really want to see whether there's any record of the kinds of carbon that hat would record the signature of ie past life in the chemistry and e understand where that stuff goes and how that links to modern life. and this is diagram, by one of e our best and brightest young ts 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.rcolat

we don't yet know if there are brine flows. we think maybe the questions raised here by how all this stuff cycles, whether the carbon is mineralized, we t have to get at that if we're e going to be serious. and maybe it will take human re, exploration to tie that togetherea. they may be flows of brine, salty waters that erupt during times when they're favorable. alfred mckeown and his team have found these in several 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.othen' how has mars lost its rove atmosphere? because it's done that.

the mars atmosphere of today is not the primortial one. in earth our atmosphere recyclee itself, became habitable. oxygenated and favorable. mars maven, lockheed martin, it godard space flight, instruments from all over the world, is going to address that question r and, after it does that, and itn asks primarily how an atmosphere that is today rather unbreathable co2, nice for plants but not so much for us. how it has evolved in time by reading the record of what's happened today in situ through various experiments, mass spectometer.oday and then looking back into time of how it might have gotten to this state. what that might have informed us about mars and link it to earth. the mission was selected on the competitively on the basis of its science and engineering. that's how we do things in science.basc it's kind of like the s.t.e.m. olympics.s. you get to send a mission to mars, if you're real good, and you get a lot of -- whatever the judges score now, but good

stuff.s tle this is curiosity taking a little selfie. maven will do that. already we know from curiosity measurements with the sam team that the record of this criticat ratio that tells you about escape rates for atmosphere, for mars versus earth, is different. this is the new number. had is the range of uncertainty from viking with very good measurements.viking this is what we would thought wm would see from meteorites and en this is what we got from one data point from curiosity.this i we want to fill in how it wouldn go from this to there.here these are big changes. we need to get at that. maven will do that.ththat. after maven does its science for nearly 700 days, we can actually use maven as a relay satellite, as a telecommunication orbiter, using electropayload from jpl to talk to recoverier and others on the surface. so, big final thing i want to nh leave you with is, this is what we're up against on mars.up aga 10,000 feet of layered rocks.

taken us 600 days to get halfway to get into this zone here. hal we want to get up into there by the end of the curiosity mission.th it's a long drive through rough terrain, you know.rive some of our best astronauts will tell me they could probably walr it in a day.uts it's taken 600. so, different economies of scale and efficiency. of course, getting a person there is a different price per performance number than sending a rover. er. so i leave you with a couple of -- i hate to use these ple diagrams, but i do love them. i took too much in college. sorry. today we have a science program up dihere.ms. it's a science-driven program asking questions like curiosity, it's what nasa science mission does. we are leading humans to mars. this is not a new chemical, but it is, in fact, humans to mars,n this meeting, and this would be a kind of goal it would be goal discovery-guided t, experiencea open to sarin dipty by having le

human people -- obviously, human people.people women and men in contact with the science.ith not light minutes away. very different way of exploring. we haven't done this before.ay. it will be different than apollo. because the people would be on their own adapting because of light time delay and com links. this is what we're doing with the space station and the next steps beyond that.the spac we put this together all moving toward this goal. this is the key first step towa together with that. you've heard that today. so, how will we explore with . people?? the final point is, there's lots of opportunities. one way is to use the kind of st telescience that we've already used in the ocean.bots artist rendering of how robots a on the surface with people, obviously, large -- they're all good.e, there's different models in human exploration request different roles for people. all good. choosing the one is not is not important now.it's mor it's more important to get the people there with the questions to ask that science is informing. and this partnership i've been

talking about all the time, whether robotics open our eyes to what mars is doing and we start to bring the human exploration in place so we can really attack the question of whether we're alone is importanp because people bring skills that our robots, whoever we build w them, how long we take, will ill never catch waup.to to. we will always be able to adapt. sometimes nonlunarly. and that's good. it's the partnership that matters. i finish with a couple of thoughts. we're here and here. a couple women on the rim of a crater doing science, biology, i geology, climatology. this is a big step. this step is going to beget that. i leave you with 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 tp open the door to what we need ct

when we get ourselves there. the that will change everything, folks. this will be like the columbus s moment. when people, men and women, touch mars themselves with the robotic tools to ask questions k that we can't ask today with our brilliant robotic program. so, i don't think you've seen anything yet. mars has never disappointed.dony it's a discovery engine. let's keep going. thank you.mars [ applause ]ion. 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. d re >> good to review. you have mentioned some resultss on water, you have talked so much about organics, the next step before looking for life. we have a mission in europe

where we search for organics, pb possibly signs of life, so what is the plan in the u.s. and what are the next mission you think o we need before with go with humans?um >> bernard, thank you. jim green will be talking about the whole program architecture this afternoon. he is the plantry division th. director. i'm just the mars science geek.m good question.sion i the mars mission is the leap to the subsurface we've all been ce 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 together with an instrument developed in g germany and godard, we will look for organics for the first time directly in the context of the physicianic samples.e discov so exo mars is a key step beyon,

everything i showed you.th the discovery potential of exo mars in 18, the mission with russia and other partners is critical as will be the mars 20 rover.part bernard's question is valid.. as we look at all this stuff e going on, we're not done.c the robotic programs have to gon keep going, beyond maven and insight, to look at heat flow background on mars, there's exo mars, the exo mars mission in 1 to look at atmospheric chemistry, there's our mars 20 rover and ee then there's the 20s open to all the young s.t.e.m. people here. bernard, excellent point. we're really thrilled to have the degree of partnership we hre have with exo mars 18 with this next generation rover, whose mobility is both horizontally and gesubsurface. today our drilling gets us this deep and our wheel scuffs get us this deep. so, we want to go -- i'm not six feet but we to want go two meters and bernard's mission will get us there. folks, science lives. thank you.

nasa hopes to put humans on mars in the next two decades. during a conference on mars exploration, one panel discussed the importance of science, technology, engineering and math education to the space program.s george washington university hosted this event. it's almost an hour. thank you for coming back from your break and the first couple keynote and the first panel this morning was really >> enlightening to me. t no i got a lot out of it.s and i think what we're going to do now, we're going to leverage and continue that discussionme.v and so i'm kent rominger, with me today we have james brown, we have julie van kleek and randy i sweet. the way i wanted to run this panel was, i'm going to give a bioon each one of the panelistsa and then let them go through either a discussion or charts that they have. and then after we're through the

panelists, then we really are e very willinalg to answer any confess you may have. answe i've got a couple for the panelists, but please be th thinking of questions you have as we're starting through this. so james brown, we have an interesting mix today on the ug panel. and i guess the first thing i should say is one of the panelists -- actually, the moderator, didn't make it for ar couple of reasons. one was sick and the other asons wasn't, so randy sweet was kind enough to jump in for us today.h but james brown, sitting here t. my left, is executive director of the s.t.e.m. education coalition.ucatio this is an alliance of more than 500 business, professional and educational organizations and ie works to raise awareness in congress, the administration ann other organizations about the t critical role that s.t.e.m. in education plays in enabling the u.s. to remain the economic and technological leader. in the global marketplace for the 21st century. and s.t.e.m., you know, i'm

happy to see s.t.e.m. is getting more and more attention as we go on because it is truly a need. prior to joining the coalition, james was an assistant director for advocacy of the american chemical society. he's a nuclear engineer.engine previously worked as a aid fo legislative aide for representative doc hastings of s washington. was directorwash of policy and development at the consumer poli energycy council of america.nerg and began his career as an and e engineerga with newport news shp building working on aircraft rk carrier construction. so, thanks. ca i might have flown off a couple of those aircraft carry yerz you worked on. probably want.ew of i probably flew off ones that on were there well before you were masters from penn state, both in nuclear engineering, and holds an mba from george washington sn nuclear engineering, and holds an mba so with that, james. >> thank you. thank you, kent. so it's a pleasure to be here and to speak to an audience like this.eike

it's also relatively tough to speak to an audience about spach issues when you have so many or stish stished people like buzz n aldrin and others in the audience. sur it's definitely an honor. i'm always surprised by the breadth of s.t.e.m. education and different things that pervade our society. and when i start talks like s this, i like to talk about one t stat i think summarizes our particular challenges within tho s.t.e.m. education community soe well. a polll was done in 2011 by the harris group that polled parents related to s.t.e.m. education a issues and they found that roughly 93% of parents are considered s.t.e.m. should be ai 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 thoune

importance of the s.t.e.m. subjects, whether it's to space, or national security or future of computing or any other technological or scientific endeavor we know from our ow history will lead to the future of the country.of the but we have yet to make the to kinds of changes in our education system to really prioritize those subjects. certainly if we're going to gete to mars, we need to draw from every part of our talent spectrum to get there. it's going to take smart engineers, it's going to take smart astronauts, it's going to take people that can build the equipment that will get us there. get u it's going to take welders, s it's going to take people of every background to be able to do that. to do but the other poll i'm quite fontd of -- this is a raytheaon 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. but at the end of the day, i think there are three things uie

when we think about how to build a competitive workforce that cae 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 n 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. we'll get to working on challenges like improving our education system at a national level. and so the united states invests about $3 billion in s.t.e.m. education programs but they're s scattered across 250 programs. s that, in itself, is a challenge. i know people in the nasa family are always dealing with issues of efficiency and trying to get the most out of federal we have investments. but we have to make sure those d investments are well spent and k we're making the kinds of big as bets towards improving education.educat the other thing the states are dealing with what are called the common core standards in math and science.esar and i think that is an in

interesting opportunity for us to improve math and science education across the board. those standards have been developed by the states. there are lots of collaborationf between states and one another. and it would be nice if, when my daughter, who is 4 1/2, is in 4 the seventh grade and we decided to move from the district of h d columbia to the state of e washington or somewhere else iah that we didn't have to repeat ee algebra. so, that's another thing, i think, is going on that's very positive and that's moving in the right direction. and the third is, if you think about the workforce that e underlies the s.t.e.m. fields, t it's a little known fact that t roughly 50% of that workforce io not going to r require a four-yr degree to enter that workforce.y and when you think about s.t.e.m. education, at least ins the minds of policymakers in this town, most of the time they're thinking about rocket scientists. they're thinking about people who are going to study in and graduate school and who are going to measure their productivity by things like patents and intellectual property and other things.in but roughly half the jobs that w

are available right now in the s.t.e.m. fields don't require a. four-year degree.cians, a they're your technicians, auto mechanicsing and everybody uses software these days.u're g even if you're going to work at the most basic level in the s.t.e.m. field, building something in an advanced facility, you're going to need a background.ree impo those are three important trends that underlie the challenges of getting to mars, of improving our health care, of dealing wit every other major challenge our country faces. >> great. thank you.aces. >> great. thank you. question for you, james. it makes a lot of sense, it's a important to improve our se education facilities, quality o education. what about the other side of how do you incentivize these children to want to go into the s.t.e.m. fields? is that a big piece of it as well? >> well, i think if you ask the 93% of parents that think it's s priority, most of them -- do we have -- can we go to the next slide?

so, one of the stats that you'll see is that most of the parentsr get that s.t.e.m. is where the jobs are. s and i think if you look at the pipeline of students going into those fields, what you'll find is the parents see the fields connection between getting a good s.t.e.m. education and jobs, but there are lots of parts of our society that are being left out of this.if you so, if you look at, for example the s.t.e.m. workforce, lation african-americans are , 11% of population but only 3% of the ac s.t.e.m. workforce. and the same is true for hispanics. it's also true for certain fields for women.wom s that's one of the challenges in terms of how do we expand that pipeline and how do we really get at that challenge?hat because it's not -- it's not nt just good policies and o the education, so they have good te tests and you have good curriculum and well-trained teachers.ll the kids can see the examples os science and technology in society if they have mentors in their families, if they have ei

good role models. and i think you're starting to see that emerge in the computing fields.look a look at the popularity of the cosmo series. that is really getting attention. it's not often that you have a face like his as the face of big face in technology and enterpri enterpriselo.gy>> t >> thank you.xt the next panelist is julie van kleek, vice president of advanced space and launch unit at aerojet rocketdime technology development and gy dv product development programs. miss van kleek joined aero jet e in 1981 and was appointed to heo present position in june of 2013. prior to this assignment she was vice president for space and launch business unit and the space program's organization fo aerojet. from 2004 to 2005 she was executive director for atlas programs. from 2001 to 2004, she served a4

executive director space system, business development responsibld for strategic direction, growtho investments and growth of aerojet space propulsion business.paceon bus from mid-1999 to october 2001,io she managed a multinational commercial launch project during which she interfaced extensively with affiliated government agencies. miss van kleek earned her ncies. bachelor of science degree fromd mechanical and aeronautical engineering from university of california and has extensive and hands-on experience in rocket research and development, liquid rocket, system design, development and testing., there' gosh, there's a lot of great stuff here. she also is a chairperson of tha european space propulsion boarde of directors.rsrectors. so, anyway, i guess to summarize this, and in julie's own words, she truly is a rocket scientist. so, julie?e tru

>> i used to be. i'm going to go over here. can i have the first slide, o please?v 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 yo u.s. competitiveness. and i'm going to do that from s. the standpoint of being a rocket company. r as i start this out, let me talt about what competitiveness is. i'm sure everybody has a different idea of what that omp 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.s i would say that, you know, we're very competitive. many people would say we're verp competitive worldwide. i think a lot of that has been because we've been technical

leaders, you know, and pushed u the envelope in a number of things, which is a part of, you know, the american spirit. a you know, as you get more of an international marketplace, you know, that's still very important.eknow, th but then the other way for competitiveness is how do you maintain, you know, being the best value or cost effective?ou and that, you know, speaking als from being a rocket scientist, we've always pushed the ten 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 bec 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 now, makes, you know, many of our aerospace companies competitive, it's do we have the technology? are we going to, you know, push as? envelope and sell those se 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 oducand workforce that can keep all thah going and keep, you know, making ourselves more competitive, and keeping this a sustainable business?e so i would say with, you know, trying to get to mars, we're going to attack every single one of those things.goin and i think it's -- you know, could bring great value to this country. next slide, please? t- you've seen this slide before.ut you saw it earlier. mr. i think both mr. bolden as well as the past panel used it. a and if you look at it, it's to showing -- charting a course too mars.d say 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, h the products to take us to mars and that will be ongoing for the next 15 to 20 years. proyear and it's necessary because thist is a very difficult thing to don but along the way, we're going n

to be driving competitiveness into the people and the companies within this country. and, likely, worldwide. you know, if you look at -- t 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, many different kinds of missions.ill b in developing this infrastructure we've had to faco technical 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 but we now have products to sell to the other applications.o if you heard mr. gerstmei rechlt, he talked about we modularity and using other

things.llo, 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.dget need we can't just spend money to gor achieve a singular goal. we live in a budget-constrained environment. every investment we make, furthering science, furthering technology is very important.oig we want to be doing that in a way that leaves us with productd that can be used elsewhere, making good on that investment.n and that's the thing that this budget constraint environment is doing, is putting us all in thab environment of having to think about how do i -- how do we create architectures, create no products?ju 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.ic etitive. okay. mars is hard. okay. yo

mars is -- you've heard, you know, many of the different challenges. it's pretty exciting when you think about him trying to attacn all those different things, youk know, with the amount of thin resources he has been allocated it also gives you a perspectivef 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. and th we're going to overcome a numbe. of difficult things, create newr technologies and see those cre things result in other products we can't even imagine today. we think of the many things tha came out of the apollo program and space program to date. we see the cameras in our cell phones, we see clean water systems that are being used in mexico. t you know, attacking those many different technological hurdles will result in things that wills benefit, you know, not just the mars program, but mankind and n companies, you know, across the

world. next slide, please.co and with that, you know, this will enhance the competitiveness of companies within the u.s., a i think we were going through, putting together for this panel every dollar invested in human h space flight has returned $8 to the u.s. economy. i would imagine we would see a e similar type of return. you know, not just going to mars but on our journey to mars, as we move through, you know, a getting beyond earth alliance an and on to mars in the 2030s. next slide, pleasehe. 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 pu panel.importan 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, e much more efficient than commercial. that means you carry much less propellant to orbit, which means your rockets are smaller and everything is much more affordable. if you look at where you're at today, you're using solar so electric propulsion in some of our -- you know, in our ome o satellites, both government ou satellites as well as commercial. the commercial world has really jumped on board.s you see a number of different su satellite architectures being upgraded to go partial or all electric. that's because the economics are good.al what this -- you know, the place of solar electric propulsion in the pursuit of mars is to ars develop the higher power systemo and to develop those de infrastructures such as solar t electric tugs that were, i think, in the last panel we talked about barges.th think about barges in space, too actually move things around. these will be far more cost ac effective than doing this with s chemical propulsion.that now you don't have to lift all that propellant off the earth. t you lift a much smaller portion

of that. you look at the types of systemp that are relevant to our, you ur know, pursuit of mars, we'll bep driving the power up, the capability of solar rays, so propulsion systems and power , systems and what we'll see is those migrate into the commercial satellite world in ne the next generation or the 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 a 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 aa company like ours in propulsionn and i look at all the things on. 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. f thank you.

>> thank you, julie. you, so the panelist on the end here is randy sweet. in his defense, until about abu seven minutes ago, he didn't he even know he was on this panel. so, he was kind enough to jump d 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 ra martin over 30 years, director d of their civil space and business development. s but he has a heritage back into the shuttle program. as a matter of fact, he was an orbital test conductor. so, when the shuttle is being processed and getting ready to a fly, when the as fraughts climb in the vehicle, they are working with otc, orbital test conductor, if you will. so, randy, with that, the floor is yours. that, >> thanks, kent.s obviously, i don't have any prepared remarks.s. but i would like to talk a i wo little about my perspective of -- first, i'll talk about fit

s.t.e.m. here a little bit. we obviously, on the orion program, we do a lot of work ino the area of s.t.e.m., both domestically and internationally.ternatio i have to say we had an exploration conference probablyt ten years ago with james c cameron, was one of the keynote speakers, and one of the things he told us, and we've kind of d built upon÷4qñ this, is you guyu should take a look at the indust entertainment industry and look at what they do. and even use the word avatar.rd this was way back before the movie "avatar." but basically what we find in s.t.e.m. is -- and we're missing this from the shuttle days.the h kent, you know this well. d we would send crews out to events, flight crews out.s and the students would ask lots. of questions about what it's ak like to fly and what it feels t like and some of those things. that's certainly a motivator fo. s.t.e.m., 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 got the flight test coming up. we have lots of events where we'll test a heat shield or we'll transport something and it's amazing. social media just blows up. there's a lot of interest out b there. when we talk about mars, it's just incredible. but in a lot of cases, cases conferences like this, we're essentially talking to a fairly small community within ourselves.nfere so, you know, it's really good that we have organizations likei theza explorer mars that are broadcasting this stuff.k 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 have work with them, you'll be seeing more of that.ee once we get crews assigned and we start getting crews more involved in events, i think those are things that we can doi to really kind of engage the

s.t.e.m. community. we have a program we call the e exploration design challenge coming up on orion where we're flying a radiation test sample. we've had a contest. sample.tion we have had a contest. i can't remember the numbers.ca but over 100,000 students have d applied. this is open internationally. we have gotten 80 countries 80 involved is. we will bent announcing the finalists at the usa engineering and science festival coming up e here. it's gotten a lot of attention. there's a lot of interest out there. i think we just need to keep doing that. >> thank you so much.ch. so folks that have questions, please start making your way to theth mikes. to maybe put this in perspective, when guys like n kneel armstrong and buzz aldrin

stepped on the moon, that had a phenomenal impact globally.gl i think a result of that is the huge numbers in aerospace engineering, technical fields today. i know as a kid, i was very, as very incentivized by that. as a result, i think where we are today is -- i think all of our companies, the average age of a worker in is in 50s. is th what we have seen is that huge generation that wasat inspired moving through.. so in next ten years, there's s going to be a large exodus and a vast opportunity for the younger, for the brand new work force. to me, it's enexciting time. they can come in and be given a lot of responsibility. because none of the old timers b will be left. there's a big gap in experience. do we think something like going to mars and putting humans on mars can kind of reset that kinh

of excitement?citeme what do you think? >> i, for one, am a huge proponent of doing these big things. is there anything you can o kid propose that wouldn't be bigger in science and technology than n to put a person on mars? and bring them back. if you want to ask -- i would ask this question slightly ques differently. i would say, you know, i'm sure ine 1956, there were people e st sitting around saying, why on e earth are we wasting our time about going to the moon?moon? what's in it for us?us what's the commercial value of f that? what are the -- why will anybody care? but i don't think anybody lookso back on that and doesn't think it was, number one, a good investment of federal dollars and of time and people and energy. would look back on going to mars the same way. because i think it's such a uniting force to try and do d something enormous like that.. and i also think the interesting dimension to this 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. but you can also look at it as a very american thing where you'rs going to attract entrepreneurs e who think of making fame and fortune off of doing it. >> do we have a question down here? >> in my outreach to high schools, especially those that t aren't located near nasa centers or in metropolitan areas, i'm finding that they really don't have any awareness of what, you negotiation t know, what the country is doing in space exploration. more significantly, the fundingu for s.t.e.m. is a small e percentage for other activitieso like athletics. this at this one high school, they

had to have a bake sale to have a robotics competition. they didn't get enough money so they didn't have it. yet they have this huge footbal field. so i guess my question is, how do we encourage -- not only encourage students, in lieu of an active human exploration program beyond lower earth orbit, how do we bring that apololo interest in s.t.e.m. that apollo generated kind of on autopilot, basically? it just happened because everybody was interested in the program. young studentsp wanted to get involved in engineering and science and math. we don't have that this -- 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 y that they see with the sports on

tv and some of the other aspectc of ourts society that aren't -- that are more visible than the c space program?program? >> i will start to answer that.. i think there's two halves to the equation. i think one of the keys in key getting mores kids interested is the s.t.e.m. field and getting e them into those careers is very sobering. that is we have to have policy changes that will make the kindt of things happen in the classroom and outside the and classroom that will really make a difference. when i hear about schools that have tried to do these things on their own and have struggled. it's not the first time i have heard that story.me i'v and i would say, we do a very good job in our best high schools in the most affluent neighborhoods of dealing with ea the s.t.e.m. subject.ct. when you watch a media report, it's kids in white lab coats who are going to college before theg

were involved in the t after-school program or the grao engineering competition or or things. they were ongine that direction were accelerating in that direction. there's another category of i en stories that aren't being told as much about the struggling schools that also see that thesc subjects are important, see thee jobs, see the connection to theo future but don't have the have resources, don't have the expertise or the critical mass to make that happen. that's where the policy change that i startedy ch talking abou the beginning is going to have the biggest bang for its buck.ie it's in those schools we will ai achieve that. the other half of the equation is the inspirational piece.has if a child has the right suppore in school but they have see thed other end of the equation, they never see the grand design thatt theyha can fit into or they nev have the mentorship experience that they can fit into, then that's also a weak link. an interesting part of this is,s we're only starting to peop

understand howle to hook people from outside the traditional s.t.e.m. college-bound population into the s.t.e.m. field. you can see this in the resonance of the astronauts of color and women, too, and how young women relate to female fe astronauts. i think that isma something thai we have to take into account it when we're thinking about these things as well.t these i would also offer a challenge o 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 space companies together and gea a movie done about going to mars. not -- i know with have had ovis movies like this before. wouldn't it be nice to have one ever so often so people didn't look at val kilmer going to mar and saying, i don't know who that is.>> >> to follow up on that, as i mentioned earlier, i -- we do the best we can with s.t.e.m. gs given the budgets we have. nasa does a great job. my fellow companies do a great r

job. we're out there doing everythin that we can.ev as i said, i think we need to leverage a few things. one is upcoming events that we have to that we need to take al advantage of and get that out there and get the top tier medit involved so that it really is a topic of discussion on all the talk shows and such. dis the other is leveraging pop culture. it's amazing when youur look ate role models of the students, especially the k through 12, eya they really look atll the entertainment industry and it's really amazingle the leverage y can get out of that. i say astronauts are a big motivator for young kids. we need to do more of that. we're talking to the folks aboua trying to get crews assigned 'r early ande trying to get more crew involvement in some of these events s i talk about cog

up. it's tremendous the impact that you can have when you bring their role models into play.y. >> did we answer your question?? >> yes. i have a couple of questions. this is a discussion of american competitiveness. how important do you all feel that cross energy and cross ipla disciplinary synergy between exploration technology and green technology and medical technology is in helping american competitiveness? because itompe seems to me that way to get more involvement and more money is to understand tha there's a very deep synergy between all these fields.thes and how do we organize s.t.e.m. education to help maximize the perception of that synergy?

so any thoughts on that? >> great question. the first thing i would say when you are thinking about >> t competitiveness is, it's a relatively new concept and rel certainly in washington and within policy circles. i think it's a term that we need to spend more time trying to understand what its components are. when policy makers think about this, if you roll back the clock a little bit, six or seven years ago it was competitiveness with india and china. that's where the tom freedman's of the world defined sense competitiveness. i think we're also competing amongst ourselves.g a because when you talk about federal investments and thinks and talk about changing the education system, really reall competitiveness -- when iy hearr that term, i think about the bot ability of families to improve themselves one generation over the other. and doing that very well is