doing that very well makes us competitive. are around the issue of equity. when the biggest potential gains are getting people who are not within the stem pipeline into the stem pipeline, i think about that being a huge advantage that we have as a country because we have a tradition of trying to broaden opportunity for all americans. if you believe that brain power and capability are equally distributed across all different parts of our society that's, by far, the biggest gain because if you have role model that is can inspire people from all different backgrounds that's how you'll open up that pipeline. i don't think we understand what being more competitive in the

global economy actually means and i think that's a good place to start. >> certainly as we -- create new processes with dealing with harsh environments, that brings us to have a skill we didn't have before. that's one way to enhance competitiveness, assume iing th other thing, it forces us to think of ways to make things more cost effective in a constrained environment. that, by its nature, is forcing a number of companies now to look at their manufacturing processes, their development processes. as we talked about with stem, having a mission like this, and

the many step it is takes to make this mission real, if we do our jobs right and we provide that inspiration of what this is, that will draw people, new people into our companies, you know. and that enhances by rejuvenating, and bringing a different mindset. as ken said we tend to have an older workforce right now. infusing that workforce with a number of, you know, large percentage of just out of college. that will change the face of many of these companies that do very special things right now and make them stronger for the future. >> those kinds of things that we have to solve will cause us to all be more competitive. but one of the things that i've noticed internally, within our

industry, is that now that we are converging on common goals here, you know, it's amazing how far we've come over the last few years now that we're all talking about stepping stones and the kind of missions that we need to do early to get to mars and some great ideas about predeploying contingency capabilities and support so we can actually go do these missionings unlike when miles mentioned some of the explorers in the past didn't have that ability. but one thing i've noticed in our industry, because we have this common goal that while we're still competitive we are really working closely together. and so it creates a different kind of competitiveness. and then if you take that up to a global scale, we're not going to do this mission just in the u.s. alone. this is going to be an international mission. i fully believe that. my opinion. and so when you take what we've

realized here domestically, in working together towards a common goal, i really believe we'll have a global common goal. we're starting to see that through the global exploration road map and some of the thing that is we're mapping out here with national interests, bringing their capabilities to the party here on how we get to mars. and i think that in itself will create kind of a different competitiveness than we traditionally think of. >> thank you. i think we have a question over here. >> hi. i'm elizabeth wallace. i was an assistant at a presentation he gave at a local stem -- local school in maryland recently and it was on mars. and his room was packed, standing room only. the first class was all female students and i thought oh, this is a great trend and the second one was all male. it was like, okay.

but it was really nice mix of both that were very, very interested and stayed the whole time and asked all kinds of questions. it's about maintaining that kind of inspiration. the second thing i would like to say is that when we had the apollo program and the whole country got excited, as we know, that kind of passion is missing, as we know. i think we can incentivize by like using -- just as the iss is a stepping stone to mars i think suborbital could be a stepping stone to what it's like to be an astronaut and have more astronauts in our community that are neighbors. researchers conference i gave a talk called space tourism is the new higher education. and it was an idea for fund-raising on college campuses so that you can create your own

astronaut varsity teams cross disciplinary and that you vote for and fund to people on your campus to go to space so that you can tell high -- middle school students and high school students, go to these universities that have these astronaut programs and so they can start thinking about what college they want to go to. and then those astronauts can help to form that vision faster because you'll have more people going up. suborbital space tourism is the money. we really need to help them. that should not be the barrier. why not get inspired when you're 18 in space? why wait until you're 50 and maybe can afford it? thank thanks. >> thank you. i don't think that was a question, was it?

so over here. >> very fast, i want you guys to speak to your audience tlout on the internet, please, and address this to the kids out there. why would they invest the time and energy to do the things that it would take to get into a stem profession? >> that's a great question. i was just thinking about the audience of students and classrooms that are watching this under the previous question. because i do think there are an awful lot of packed classrooms when you talk about this particular topic. you know, there are a bunch of different reasons somebody would think about the stem fields as an opportunity. if i'm wearing my hat as a parent for a minute i'll tell you it's because that's where you'll get a good job and that's where you'll be a great citizen. if i'm wearing my entrepreneur's hat i'll say that's where you can make a name for yourself nowadays. last time i checked the best-selling app was just sold for $2 billion.

so that might take an afternoon's worth of work somewhere to create that. that would be wonderful if that was my job. i would also say if you're interested in where the future is going, that's also where the future is going. in the sense that we do have sort of an interesting astronaut now. i was thinking about the movie "gravity" while you were talking and the analogy and the example that sandra bullock has in that movie. but i also think that people can see those role models more frequently now than they did ten years ago. there are lots of images in our society that can promote that kind of awareness to kids. it's not just about getting a job or doing well but doing something that's interesting and fun, which is what most kids are looking for. >> great answers. question over here? >> my question had more to do with international

competitiveness and our own space industry. where are we going to reach a point where we're not heavily reliant on heritage system for space technology? when we reach that point do you think it will make a huge difference in the rate at which we're advancing, and the direction that we take? >> so i know i'm the moderator but i'll take a quick stab at that. i think they got that one pretty right this morning earlier when they were talking. the fact is that going to mars is hard. going to mars is very expensive. and so we need to put those dollars where we'll gain the most out of them as far as new technology technologies solar propulsion is one. going to mars is very risky. so we have astronauts in orbit today. they're literally minutes away from the earth's surface if we

needed to get them home. once they've done a deorbit burn they're only six minutes away from the earth's surface. going eight days away is probably the next good step. realistically, we're going to mars. you're months and months away from getting back home if something fails and you don't have a backup, an alternative. understanding those systems is really, really critical. the other one that keeps coming up was basic chemical propulsion. it takes a lot of mass. like what julie talked about earlier, it's an area where we really now can be very competitive globally, once we develop that technology. and it has a lot of applications that are very widespread, more

so than just helping us get humans to mars. as a human, you probably don't want the human on that system, at least not for the long journey. it's kind of slow. for all the other mass, staging of equipment, orbiters and landers, it's probably a great technolog technology. >> adding to that, it's enabling to some of the architectures we're talking about when you start looking at having the ability to take everything with with you that you need, including contingencies. it's really, really hard. the mass numbers just don't add up. having the ability to predeploy things, that's what sep does for you. you have to send it way ahead of time, can you predeploy capabilities so that you don't have to necessarily take everything with you. and i think that's enabling for some of the architectures we're talking about. not to mention it opens up commercial opportunities.

and i think, you know, the u.s. does have a leadership position in some of these areas. if you look at an endeavor like mars, it's so broad. to think that we would lead every part of it would -- it's probably not practical. we would look for those things that are, you know, most aligned with where the u.s. interests are. anybody that's part of this will end up with world leadership and some aspect of it. >> do you see us relying on u.s.-made rocket engines rather than russian rocket engines any time in the near future? >> at least for the next two weeks. >> okay. >> you look at economics in the most efficient way, to get payloads into orbit, the u.s.

has a combination of rockets made right here in the u.s. some of the different engines are imported, obviously, and i'm sure you're referring to the rd 180 issue with the engines with russia. the flipside of that is what's going on on the space station with cosmonaut sbchlt s and astronauts together. it's been unaffected and if anything it helps to stabilize relationships. >> iss tremendous success has been our ability to work with international partners and that has worked out very well. we need to leverage that going forward in terms of propulsion, i fully believe that down the road in the future, we'll have a combination of foreign and u.s. provided engines. >> thanks. >> great question. >> hi. chuck devine. the only group i'm currently a leader of is washington metro

men's -- a few years back as part of the governor's workforce investment board in maryland leading a committee dealing with, among other things, getting people to come into tech fields, particularly in aerospace. some of the things i heard as part of the governor's workforce investment board, young people -- now we're not talking 10 or 12-year-olds. we're talking about 19, 20, 22-year-olds -- are now starting to avoid stem fields. for reasons such as very work/life balance, very poor management in their fields and also this is the men's person in me coming out. one of the things that's become very popular in at least the high i.q. groups is, believe it or not, home schooling. because we don't like things that common core and we're getting better results teaching

on our own than we are seeing in our schools. would anyone care to comment on this? are you doing anything to bring these kinds of problems to the attention of the people currently in the fields? >> i'll take that one. there's so many interesting dimensions to this at any given time that stem education certainly is not a monolith. when i read the opinion pages about this issue there's a constant back and forth over whether we have too many of this type of engineer, not enough of that type of scientist. i think that's healthy of the field. it's not monolithic. we don't need more of all stem graduates and we don't train them all the same. one of the skill sets that is still not really a part of the mix, that explains some of the trend you're talking about -- what you see in some fields is a relatively high amount of turnover or leaving in the field by recent college graduates.

the thought that they're going to do x, y, z and find out that the field is not really that. one of the ways in which you get at that challenge is making sure those kids -- the kids most commonly that don't stay within the stem fields didn't have a person in their family that was involved in that field, they didn't have a mentorship experience, they didn't have an internship. and the next best explanation is that they didn't have the type of training and teams that has how most companies work. those are all things that are very hard to -- almost impossible to legislate. they're all social skills. and those are not things that we can expect, you know, standards or policies to address directly. i thivg the way you address them is by if you really make the stem projects a priority and hold the people who run our schools accountable for it, we'll phil figure out how to

solve those challenges the same way we'll figure out which rocket system will get us to mars if we're going to go to mars. >> thank you. you bring up a really good point. this generation is different. so, i think all of our companies are trying to understand where they're coming from. work/life balance. social media is key in how we work with the generations. the fact is that it's a much different world today than it was, you know, when buzz, sitting here, stepped foot on the moon from a country that had just come out of the depression, very difficult time we worked there.

parents are aware -- but the students not necessarily. and certainly i have a bunch of friends who are interested in stem fields because i'm one of them. i tend to associate with people like that. but i was wondering if there are some takeaways that i could -- so i could communicate, get -- generate more interest in people that might not necessarily be friends with.

following things like this on social media. i would say one of the things that would be an interesting challenge is there are an awful lot of really cool people tweeting about science and technology issues and if i were somebody running one of these

companies, who saw a really interesting project that a group of students at your high school were doing, i would want to be involved with it in social media. that's a good way to get recognition, to show your colleagues that somebody actually cares about these things. it's also a potentially good way

hearing today that shows the importance of the hearing in a lot of respects. i want to thank all the students from the high school here as well. i understand you had a choice of hearings to attend in fact, you could attend almost any hearing you wanted to. and you chose this one because you thought it was the most interesting. actually, that is one of the purposes of today's hearing. that is to inspire students today to be the scientists of tomorrow.

and who knows. we may have some of those scientists in the audience right now who will be inspired by what they hear to study astrobiology or perhaps some of the other sciences as well. we appreciate your attendance. i will recognize myself for an opening statement and the ranking member as well. as we discover more planets around the stars and our own galaxy, it's natural to wonder if we may finally be on the brink of answering the question, are we alone in the universe. finding other life in the universe would be the most significant discovery in human history. scientists estimate that there are 80 billion stars in the milky way galaxy. to date more than 1700 nearby planets have been found. last month, astronomers

discovered the first earth-like planet. it is 10% larger than the earth and 490 light years away. the survey satellite which will launch in 2017 and a telescope launching in 2018 will help scientists discover more planets with potential bio-signatures. the united states has pioneered the field of astrobiology and continues to lead the world in this type of research. a sample of professional papers published in science magazine between 1995 and 2013 illustrates the significant growth and growing popularity of the field of astrobiology. between 1995 and 2012, the number of papers published on astrobiology increased ten times the number the scientific reports that cited it increased

25 times. astrobiology is a serious subject studied y eied by serio scientists around the world. next september the library of congress will hold a symposium on what the impacts could be of finding microbial, plex or intelligent life in the universe. whether life exists on other planets is a matter of debate among scientists. around the world a number of astronomers listen to radiofrequencies. they try to filter out the noise and interference of humahuman-m noises. a telescope financed by microsoft co-founder paul allen and another one in puerto rico are two well-known locations for conducting radio astronomy searches for life in the universe. recently radio astronomers have detected pulsed signals that

last only a few milliseconds. these fast radio bursts have caused scientists to speculate as to their cause. some scientists hypothesize they could be from stars colliding or from an extraterrestrial intelligence source. others search for laser impulses. researchers use optical telescopes to try to detect nanosecond pulses or flashes of light distinct from pulses or other naturally occurring phenomenon. i hope today's hearing will enable us to learn more about how research in astrobiology continues to expand this fascinating frontier. the unknown and unexplored areas of space spark human curiosity. americans and others around the world look up at the stars and

wonder if we are alone or is there life on other planets. that concludes my opening statement. the ranking member, miss johnson, is recognized for hers. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman. good morning. in the interest of saving time, i will forego making an opening statement and instead i will simply want to welcome dr. shostak and dr. werthimer to this hearing. you both are distinguished researchers and i know that you will have thoughtful testimony to present. this afternoon we will determine whether we will have researchers to continue this. so thank you and i yield back. >> thank you, miss johnson. i would like to introduce our witnesses at this point. our first witness, dr. seth s w

shostak. he has spent many of his career conducting radio astronomy research on galaxies. he has written more than 400 published magazine and web articles on various topics in astronomy, technology, film and television. he has edited and contributing to nearly a dozen scientific and popular astronomy books. he is authored four books including sharing the universe, perspectives on extraterrestrial life and confessions of an alien hunter, a scientist's search for extraterrestrial intelligence. you can hear him each week as host of a one hour long radio program on astrobiology entitled big picture science. he received his bachelor's from princeton and ph.d. from the california institute of technology. our second witness, dr. dan werthimer is the director of several of the lab's centers

includesing the seti research center. mr. werthimer serves as chief scientist for the lab's seti at home program and is associate director of their berkeley wireless research center. he co-authored seti 2020. his research has been featured in many broadcast news stories such as on abc and cbs and many major newspapers and magazines. his work has reached a younger audience through a science magazine for kids. mr. werthimer received his bachelor and master's from san francisco state university. i will recognize to start us off today dr. shostak. then we will go to mr.

werthimer. >> thank you, congressman smith, for the country to be here. i'm going to give you a few big picture thoughts on the search for life. and in particular intelligent life, the kind of life that could uphold its side of the conversation as opposed to the microbal life. this is a subject of great interest to many people. let me back up a say that when you read in the paper about the discovery of new planet or something water on mars, you are looking at one of thing horses in a race to be the first to find extraterrestrial biology. the first horse is to find it near bi. that's where the big money is. rovers on mars, moons of the outer solar system, at least a half a dozen other worlds that might have life in our solar system. the chances of finding it i think are good. if that happens, it will happen in the next 20 years depending on the financing. the second horse is to build very large instruments that can sniff, if you will, the atmospheres of planets around other stars and maybe find oxygen in the atmosphere or

methane which is produced by cows and pigs and things like that. biology in any case. so you could find pigs in space, i suppose. that's again a project, depending on funding, that could yield results in the next two decades. the third horse is seti, and that idea, if you have seen the movie contact, you know what it is, it's to eavesdrop on signals that are leaked off somebody else's world. that makes sense because in fact even we, only 100 years after the invention of practical radio, we have the technology that would allow us to send information across light years of distance to extraterrestrials. let me tell you why i think they're out there. it's unproven whether there's any life on earth. you heard me say twice now that i think that situation is going to change within everyone's lifetime in this room.

the reason is, we're -- the universe is very -- it has habitats for life. congressman smith mentioned the numbers of stars in our galaxy. that number is rather larger. it's two to 400 billion stars. we now know that at least 70% of them have planets. recent results from nasa's telescope suggests that one in five stars may have planets that are cousins of the earth. what that means is that in our own galaxy, there are tens of billions of other planets that are the kind you might want to build condos on and live. tens of billions. if that isn't adequate for your requirements, let me point out there are 150 billion other galaxies we can see with our scopes, each with a similar compliment of earth-like worlds. what that means is the numbers are so astounding that if this is the only planet in which not only life but intelligent life

has arisen, then with exceptional. it's like buying lottery tick e ets and nobody is a winner. the history of astronomy shows every time we thought we were special, we were wrong. we have had various kinds of radio searches. i won't detail the technology. we have looked at parts -- much of the sky at low sensitivity over a limited range of radio wave lengths, radio sections of the band. we have looked in particular directions at a few thousand star systems. we have just begun the search. the fact that we haven't found anything means nothing. it's like looking for a megaphone in africa and giving up after you examined one city block. the reason the search has been so constricted so far is simply, to be honest, the fact that there's no funding. it's privately funded. the number of people in the

world that do seti for a living is few irthan the number of people in any row in the audience here behind me. that's the world total. when are we going to find them? you heard me suggest that may happen quickly. let me point out two other things. one, this is very interesting to the public, because they have seen extraterrestrials on television and in the movies all their lives. that also gives it a certain giggle factor. of it's easy to make fun of this. it would have been easy to make fun of the idea to sail around the earth or captain cook to map the south pacific. it's exploration. that's what this is. the consequences are always, shall we say -- there's life out there, intelligent life would calibrate our position in the universe. it would as congressman smith says probably be the greatest discovery that human kind could make.

>> thank you, dr. shostak. mr. werthimer. >> thanks for the opportunity to talk to you about this question, are we alone, is anybody out there. can you show the slides? i want to walk you through some of the seti experiments that we are doing. as seth mentioned, the nasa mission, we learned there are a trillion stars. we learned that a lot of the planets are what we call goldilocks planet, it's not too hot, not too cold, rocky planets, some have liquid water. there could be life out there. how are we getting in touch? one idea is that ernl liarthline been sending out signals for the last 75 years. early television shows like "i love lucy" have gone past 10,000 stars. you could turn that around.

if we're broadcasting, maybe other civil gagss aizations are signals rg either leaking the way we send off signals or maybe a deliberate signal. they could be sending laser signals. there are projects looking for laser signals. this is a project that harvard -- this is a project as lick observatory. there's a project in ohio at a telescope looking for laser signals. people are looking for radio signals chltd our group uses the world's largest radio antenna. they is in puerto rico. it's 1,000 feet in diameter. it holds 10 billion bowls of corn flakes. we haven't actually tried that. it's operated by the national science foundation. most astronomers would be lucky to use this a day or two a year. we figured out a way to use the telescope at the same time that other scientists are using it. we can collect data all year round, all day. we're collecting data right now

as we talk to you. that actually a problem. even though we get it all year round, it creates an enormous amount of data. to analyze that we ask volunteers for help. if you -- you can help us by running a program on your home computer or your laptop. you install a program called seti at home. it's a screen saver program. we break it up into pieces, everybody gets a different piece of the sky to analyze. you install this program. it pops up when you go out for coffee. the computer goes through the data looking through all the frequencies and signal types. this is what it looks like when it's running on your computer at home. it takes a few days to analyze data. looking for interesting signals. when it finds interesting signals, it sends them to berkeley. you get a new chunk of data to work on. if you are the lucky one that

finds that feiaint murmur, you might get the nobel prize. but you have to maybe share it with a lot of people. there are millions of people that have downloaded this. th they are in 200 countries. it's to gather the volunteers -- it's one of the most powerful super computers on the planet. we're very grateful to the volunteers. now we have made that more again so that you can participate in not just seti with your home computer but you can participate with lots of projects. there's climate prediction, gravity wave, protein folding. look for malaria, hiv, cancer drugs. you can allocate how you want it to be used on your computer. we are working on pancrometic seti. we are asking universities to look at frequencies.

we're targeting the nearest stars. we're trying to cover all the different bands that come through the earth's atmosphere. we're looking at radiofrequency, infrared frequencies and we're looking at optical frequencies looking for laser signals. this is an extremely comprehensive search. we have eight telescopes we're using. looking at the different bands. only targeting nearby stars. another project we're launching this year is interplan teetary eavesdropping. there may be signals going back and forth between two planets. maybe we will have machines or people on mars and we will have radio communication or laser communication between our two planets. put it the other way. distance civilization may have colonize ed a planet and there y be signals going back and forth.

now we know when two planets in a distant solar system are in lined up with earth. we can schedule our observations and target that and see if we can intercept the signals. we're using the green bank telescope in west virginia to do that experiment. we haven't found e.t. so far. we made discovers. we discovered a planet made out of diamond. the first maps of the black hole. the instruments with used in all kinds of things, in brain research which may control prosthetic arms. we haven't found e.t. we're just getting in the game. we have only had radio 100 years. we're learning how to do it. it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. i'm optimistic. the reason i'm optimistic in the long run is that the seti is limited by computing technology which is growing exponentially. china is building a huge telescope. the australians and south

africans and europeans are working on a huge telescope made out of thousands of dishes. i think i will stop there. i have a couple of poems i could read from the volunteers. i'm out of time. thank you very much. >> thank you, mr. wedge myrrthi. you have anticipated my questions a little bit. i would like to go forward with them. let me address the first question to both of you by starting with dr. shostak. it is this. what do you think -- i can anticipate your answer a little bit on the basis of your statement. what do you think is the possibility of microbal life being found in the universe or intelligent life being found in the universe? the first question goes to the possibility. the second question would be, what do you think is the likelihood of finding either microbial life or intelligent life in the universe. two different questions. dr. shostak. >> the probability of life --

it's hard to estimate because what we know know -- something we didn't know very recently, even 10, 20 years ago we did not know were there habitats that could support life. what astronomy has proven is that the entire universe is made out of the same stuff. the most distant galaxies have the same 92 elements on the wall in your classroom. this means that if you have taken chemistry in school, you don't have to take it again if you move to another galaxy. it's all the same everywhere. we know that the building blocks are there. they are going to be plenty of planets where you have liquid water, an atmosphere that you have in hyattsville. life could arise. life began on earth very quickly. it's only a sample of one. that's not convincing, but it does suggest that it wasn't very difficult for life to get a foothold on this planet. maybe elsewhere. life, i think, is maybe not so hard to get started. that's the general impression among scientists.

what they believe is not important. what about intelligent life? that's harder. the earth has had life we know for at least 3.5 billion probably 4 billion years. almost since the beginning. this place has been pcarpeted with life. it was all microbial. in the last 500 million years did you get multi-cellular life, you know the whole story. that opens up the question, you know, if i give you a million worlds with life, what fraction will cook up something as clever as you? the answer to that is, we don't know the answer to that. the there are suggestions it will happen given enough time because we're not the only species that's gotten clever in the past 50 million years. if you have dogs and cats at home, they're clever esher than

dinosaurs. >> it's exponential growth in astrobiology research. >> i suspect the universe is teaming with microbial life. it would be bizarre if we are alone. i don't know that for sure. the intelligence is going to be rarer. because there are a trillion planets, i believe it will happen often. it's happened on this planet. it's likely to arise elsewhere. >> at 100%? >> 99. >> 99.999 -- strung on out. okay. good. the next question, mr. werthimer, let me follow up with you. as far as the seti at home, screen save other that would be something for the students here to take advantage of. i tried to adopt that to my laptop in my office several years ago. maybe the government needs to change its policy. i'm not sure.

let me ask you, what are the advantages and disadvantages of radio seti versus optical? >> there are lots of pros and cons. lazers are good for point to point communication, lots of data. i think the best strategy is a multiple strategy. we should be looking for all kinds of different signals and not put all our money in one basket. it's hard to predict what other sill i have san die civilizations are doing. we try to launch a new idea every year. >> dr. shostak, anything to add to advantages or disadvantages? >> i should point out that they are both sort of different colors of the sale thing. in fact, literally different colors. they are electromagnetic fields of communication. we use both here. i suspect allens will as well. every year i get an e-mail that say, you are looking for radio signals, that's so old school.

the extraterrestrials will use something much more sophisticated than that. i'm not sure what that is. that depends on physics we don't know. one shouldn't discount a technology because it's been around a while. we use the wheel every day. that's a pretty old technology. i suspect we will continue to use the wheel for a long time. >> thank you for your answers to my questions. the ranking member, miss johnson, is recognized for her questions. >> thank you very much. i'm trying very hard to ask something that sounds sensible. what is the status of the extraterrestrial intelligence research now? >> i think we're just getting in the game. we're learning how to do this. i think we would be lucky to find -- even though i'm optimistic about life, intelligent life in the universe, it's likely there's a galactic internet out there, i think we would be lucky to find

them. >> might point out that contrary to popular impression, this experiment isn't the same from day to day. people figure we're sitting around with ear phones listening to cosmic static, a tedious job, if that's what it were. but it's not. all the listening is done by computers. the important point is that much of this experiment depends on digital technology, computers, if you will. as you know, there's something called moore's law that says whatever you can buy today for a dollar, you can buy twice as much for a dollar go years from now. there's this very rapid growth in the capabilities there. in fact, the search is speeds up. it's speeding up exponentially. a heavily over used word. but it applies. >> tell me this. i know that the improvement of technologies are important. and yet some of the old

technologies or old techniques are still in play. how do you predict your advancement based on what you have available to you for research tools? >> i will just say something. i'm sure dan has much to add to this. in terms of what we can do in the near future, what you really i think need to do, if you want to have a decent chance of success, this has to remain speculative. this is all like asking chris columbus, have you found any new continents? his answer would be, there was water around the ship today. by the way, also yesterday water around the ship and tomorrow it's in the vicinity of the ship. he can't predict when anything interesting is going to happen, nor can we. if you look at what are called estimates -- they are guesses as to what fraction of stars out there have somebody that you might be able to pick up, it

sounds like you have to look at a few million star systems to have a reasonable chance of success. we can't do that today. we have not done that today. we have done less than 1% of that as of today. given the given the predictable advancements in technology, to look at a few million star systems is something that can be done within two million years given the funding to do it. >> welcome. >> now, when we find the life on other planets, what do you speculate we find? and what is the value -- potential value? >> i think it's profound either way. this is not an expensive thing. of our million dollars a year, we're funded by national science foundation, nasa, some pry vats

donations. the reason i think it's profound either way, if we discover that we are alone, we better take very good care of life on this planet. it's very precious. and the other thing that's profound, too, 23 we find we're part of a galactic community and get on the galactic internet, learn all of their poetry, literature. we could learn a lot. >> nobody knows what we'd learn. if we can decode the signal thrks is sothis is sort of being confronted with hieroglyphics. it turns out the hieroglyphics were written by humans. so we might not ever figure it out. if you could, you would listen today that being sent by societies far in advance of us, we're hearing them, not the other way around. so they're more advanced. and maybe they teach you some very important stuff, who knows. imagine that the incas find a barrel that's washed up on the shore, you know, on the shore, you know, maybe from europe, it's filled with books.

if they could ever figure out the books, they would earn a lot of interesting stuff. i don't know that we will ever figure out the books, but even if we don't, the important point has been made. and that is we have calibrated our place, not in the physical univers univer universe, we've sort of done that. but maybe in the intellectual universe. and i think that's good for our souls to know where we fit in. >> thank you. the gentleman from ohio is recognized for his question. >> thank you, mr. chairman. the gentleman, fur both of you, how has the recent discovery of over 1700 planets by the kepler space telescope, how has that impacted sedi research? >> if you had asked the astronomers 20 years ago, they would say are there planets going around other stars. and they would say oh, i don't

know. and is thatthat's all changed n. if you extrapolate on that, there are a trillion planets in the milky way galaxy. that's about three or four times more planets than there are stars. that's a lot of places for life. squl i thi . >> i think it's also perfect it had experiments. certain kinds of stars, certain masses of staurs, certain brightnesses of stars. those are the ones that we thought these might have an earth like plan. we don't know. dan has just mentioned, we know that the majority of stars have planets. you can just look at a random star and feel fairly confident that it has a planet. we're beginning to get some indication from kepler, what fraction 06 stars have planets like the earth. it's not one many a million or a thousand or a hundred. it might be one in five. so you look at fifty star

systems and there's ten earth-like planets. we look at all the nearby stars we can. >> would you please provide some examples of the technical contributions that sedi has made to astronomy and other fields 1234 for example, how has sedi research benefitted other areas of science? >> well, i think that its benefit is less so in terms of discovery. we haven't found e.t. if we had, we wouldn't be having this hearing. and to my surprise, i'm surprised sedi has not turned up any astrophysical data. every time you build an instrument, it examines a different, if you will, parameter, in the phase space of the universe, you find something new. so that's instructive, that i hasn't. the kind of tekdnology that's been developed is certainly of interest to other fields in astronomy. i think the real value of sedi

is not what it does in terms of astronomy but what it does to the other efforts being finalized in space. nasa has the big efforts. the rovers on mars, yes, they're there to find the hydrology, the water on mars. but wihy are you interested? you want to know were there ever martians. that's what interests people the most. sedi was always a punch line, if you will, to this story that nasa had. finding traces of water on mars and selling it. sedi was always, okay, life, we may find life, but what about intelligent life? that would be even more interesting. and that's what's missing, in fact, from the nasa program today.

>> you made a comment a few minutes ago that caught my attention. you said if we hear from intelligent life out there somewhere, that they must be more advanced from us because we're hearing from them and not the other way around. how can you draw that conclusion? i mean, maybe they've been hearing from us for a long time and just don't like what we have to say? [ laughter ] >> i think it's entirely possible that we're in catalog. i think life in the universe is going to be lots of different stages. some will be microbial, some will be trees, some will be sophisticated. . >> just to point out, you're not going to hear from any less-advanced societies. they're not building radio trar

transmitters. >> maybe they got their caller id block turned on or something. >> it could be. i wouldn't speck late on alien sociology and whether they'd like our television or not. but the chances that they're within a hundred or a thousand or even ten thousand years, certainly. >> one question for both of you. how would you define successful sedi research. i know that's kind of a nebulous question. >> if you found a signal, and that could be corroborated, if you just found it once and you could not find it again, that's not science. if you find a signal that's must'ving across the sky, it's a narrow-band signal and it's not made by nature, that's success. >> i think it's finding some sort of artifact of technology,

a radar signal a navigational beacon that won't contain a lot of information, but we know we're not alone. >> okay. thank you, mr. chairman. i yield back. >> thank you. and if the gentlewoman would just yield to me for ten seconds? it was mentioned to me a while ago that the likelihood is if there were other intelligent civil saigizations civilizations, there would be far more advanced than we are. it's fascinating to think what form of life might be existent in a universe or parallel universe. they had a 2 million year head start. we might not be able to communicate with them. but that's just one of the reasons we're fascinated by the sublt. and none of us would be counted and charged against the gent 8 woman. >> thank you so much for having me here.

i noticed in your testimony that you said that there were 24 sedi scientists on the planet. i can't think of a time when we had a larger amount of experts on our panel. thank you so much for being here, i really appreciate it. doctor, i'm really intrigued by your testimony and how the idea of life and space is an idea that everyone grasps and is especially an ideal hook for interesting young people in science. i think that's evidenced by the full committee room today. one of the statements that resonated with me is it would be a cramped mind indeed that didn't wonder who might be out there. i really appreciate that. you said also in your testimony, extraterrestrials are someone we would like to know more about. i recollect a similar hearing

last year with one of my colleagues. and i'm fairly certain it was representative chris smith who's no longer on the committee said the interesting question is what do we do when we find life on another planet? so what's the plan? do we announce it to the world? do we do research to determine if these are friendly or collaborative? what do we do when we make the discovery, assuming that it's going to happen? >> that's a question of great interest to the public. to begin with, there's no danger. you tune in your favorite d.j. here in d.c. on the car radio and there's no danger that that d.j. is going to jump in the car with you at the same time. they don't know you picked them up. if we pick up a signal, they don't know that.

there is the question should we reply. what happens? suppose we should pick up the signal? it would be afounnounced. there is no plan. we have had false alarms and i've waited for my congressman to call me up and say hey, you guys have picked up a signal. what about that? nobody in the government shows a slightest interest. the new york times would call up. so what happened happen is it would immediately be known that we found a sigdal. it would be known even before it would have been corroborated. so there will be false alarms. but what you would do, you would not believe it yourself if you were the only ones to find out. there are too many thing that is could go wrong. >> i think before we make a big announcement

announcemented, y announcement, you want to make sure it's real. you ask different people with different equipmented to verify it. then you can triangerer ulate a make sure it's not a student pulling a prank. at the point you're pretty confident you found something, you make all the information public and i think there will be a lot of debate about whether it's some new, natural phenomenon or evidence of another civilization. >> and could you also address of the 24 sedi scientists on the planet, how collaborative are we? we have a plot of discussions in this committee about international collaborative, especially in space. can you talk about where we are as a nation compared with the

other country ins the world? >> yeah. sedi is quite fragile. as you said, there are 24 people doing it. there are about two-thirds of them in the u.s. the u.s. is leading this effort and a lot of the original ideas have come out of the u.s. and because it's so fragile, we're trying to train new people and get new ideas and get other groups because it's only at a very small number of institutions right now. the funding is fragile, too. it's fluctuating around. the two biggest telescopes on the planet are currently funded by the national science foundation. those are in funding jeopardy. one looks like it's going to have to shut down. the chinese are building a bigger telescope. there's a new one in south africa and australia. the u.s. may not continue to lead this work, but it is now. >> i would find that disapointing if that happened.

>> and i'm out of time. >> the jentgentleman from new y is recognized. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i think i might ask the question everyone in this room wants to ask. have you watched "ancient aliens" and what's your comment about that series? >> yes, i think i've been on it, actually. the public is fascinated with the idea. i personally don't share the conviction that we are being visited. i don't think that that would be something that all the governments of the world had managed to keep secret. i don't think that. but the idea that maybe we were visited during the egyptian times. keep in miepd, mind, the 4.5

billion years of the earth, the time of the egyptians was yesterday. i don't find very good evidence. i think the pyramids were built by egyptians. that's a radical idea. they were very clever and they could certainly do that. i don't think that there's any good evidence to me that we were visited in historic times. >> ufos have nothing to do with extraterrestrials. even though i'm optimistic with life, there's no evidence of any of the these sightings. we get a lot of calls when the space station goes over although some people embellish and say it has windows and some things. some of it is people's imagination. we know that because it ties very closely to popular culture. when jules verne wrote about

flying saucers and tied to movies, some of it is deliberate hoaxes for people making money. >> thank you, that was my only question. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i feel like i should have been here earlier. so i apologize. i've enjoyed the discussion thus far and reading the testimony. my favorite moivorite mulovie i" it's out every year. it's a little bit hue brous.

i'm a little bit curious. in your prepared statement, you discussed the panachromatic sedi process using six telescopes similar to the suns. and so the project, as you described it, would examine a large portion of the electromagnetic spectrum spanning from low frequencies io detect possible signals from advanced civilization. how are the target stars that you talked about identified? and how are you going to coordinate the use of the six telescopes? >> we are not trying to use the six telescopes at the same time. we're working with a lot of groups and universities and observatories. typically, we'll use one telescope and then a month later, we'll use other telescopes.

we're just tar getting the nearest stars. >> you talked also about this notion that there were just sort of 24 folks, you know, most interested robustly, academically studying this. but aren't there a whole network of people in communities that kind of feed or fuel some of the research that you 'doing? >> dan refers to me because i don't think we know the answer to that question. it would be like saying, sure, there are a few thousand people, but what about the community that is are feeding that. if you don't have the instrument, it's very hard to do the experiment. and the number of incidents involved here is really small. >> so the rest of us are just dreaming and pretend sng. >> well --

>> that's all right. you don't have to answer that. i was not serious at all. and i want to talk about security issue ins the time that we have left. i understand that early on, there was an assessment of the robustness of the sedi home software to withstand malicious attacks and penetrations. and in the earlier study, you found that there had been two note word thi attacks and the web server was compromised. can you give us an idea of the current state of security? >> it actually turns out that sedi home is one of the safest things you can install on your computer. the fact of the matter is millions of people are installing it and checking it

out. it's been running for a really long time. it's open source software. anybody can read the software and help us -- a lot of the volunteers actually help us write the software and we're now recording to cell phones chrks will allow a lot of people, everyone more people, to participate in the search. i guess with open source, the challenge of the system is vulnerability. >> yeah, i actually think open source software is a little safer because so many eyeballs can look at it. >> okay. i'm done. id think i'll just go back to watching my movies. >> the gentleman from florida? >> thank you, mr. chairman. and thank you for inviting these distinguished witnesses for this

fascinating testimony. very enjoyable. i go to the sedi home page every day. i haven't been there a single day to find that i already knew your message of the day. very educational. very inspiring. obviously, very interesting. graphics always good, too. i want to thank you for that. on your disclosurdisclosure really impressed with the number of agreements. nasa is just so engaged with you there and still allow you all to have a pretty free hand to do what you do better than i think than anybody else is doing it, obviously. and so thank you for that. >> all of those grants, by the

way, are for the astrobiology research. there's no search going for intelligent life, but we do -- the majority of our scientists are doing astrobiology, the life on mars, the outer solar system. >> and we're glad you are. >> yes. so are we, i can assure you. that's a very productive line of research, as well. as i say, i am personally quiet skept wall. by the way, if you think this is especially american opinion that's wrong. i don't think that that efd is very good chlts i think if we were being visited, it wouldn't be controversial.

i think if they were really here, everyone would know that. >> okay. very good. steven hawking, i believe, made some comments about extraterrestrials or other life. what are your comment sns. >> this is a topic about whether we should transmit messages, that's called active sedi. most people in the field think that we're just an emerging civilization. we're frying to see signals out there. we think that advanced civilizations are going to be peaceful if you watch star trek. but we don't know that. and that may be naive. so my feeling is that we should be just listening for now.

maybe in a thousand or ten thousand years, we should think about transmitting signals. so that's a big decision about who should speak for earth. >> i'm going to disagree a little bit with with my colleague. i think there's very little danger in transmitting, and if there is, we're already doing it. we're not deliberately targeting stars in general. nasa sent a beatles song in 2008 to the north star. it will take 450 years to get there and they may not like the beatles. the most pow rful transmitters are coming off the airports for air navigation, for the dew line, all of these things, these signals are on their way into space. they've already reached several thousand star systems. any society that has the

technical competence to threaten you across dozens, hundreds, thousands light years of space, any soet at that level can pick up these signals. if you're really going to worry about this, shut down the radars at the local air ports and, personally, i don't think that would be a good idea. >> briefly, your thoughts on thornton? >> i'm not familiar with the topic. >> are you talking about the nuclear reactor? >> i'm really not an expert. i'm sorry. if you're talking about powering space craft this way, 23 you send spacecraft to some of the more interesting parts of the solar system, they're in the boondocks. when you get to saturn, the matter of sunlight is dropped by the matter of a hundred. you can't use solar cells. i wouldn't worry too much about radio5:00 tichty in space

because space has plenty of radioactivity. but if you're worried about the fact that these launches could go wry and you would land these things on earth, yes that's a danger. but, of course, people are aware of that danger and they try to mitigate it. >> thank you. i thank both the witnesses. >> so what have we learned. we learned that the aliens don't like the beatles. and a couple questions i just wanted to sort of get my head around some of the current scientific understanding. let's walk through a scenario and you tell me if it's plausible.

it's the world. it's our earth. and rock is flown out into the stellar. it carries dna. does that dna survive? >> yes, the idea that one world could affect another world has been looked at. people have actually simulated the environment in space and put some bacteria into a rock and put it in space to see how long they could survive. would the dna still be viable when it got someplace interesting. could a rock from mars have seeded the earth? that is possible. the life that would survive would remain viable over the kind of time scales to send rock

ins the solar system from one world to another. but if you're talking about seeding worlds in other solar systems, 2 problem is space is a pretty harsh environment, everyone for a rock. there's a lot of raid yax and it's incessantly dry. >> i think that's the current sort of thought right now. >> yeah, so, as you know, asteroids have hit the earth many times. and so it will be a really interesting question if life is found in our own solar system, like, for instance, europea has a liquid ocean, something could be swimming around down there. by the way, when i talk to l. ri schools i say how are we going to get through the ice and see if there's something swimming down there t boys say we should use machine guns and bombs, and

the girls say we should melt our way through using mirrors. but anyway, once again, proving something is in our dna that makes us different. >> so if we doe find life, it's really exciting to figure out is it exactly the same kind of life. does it use the same dna, the same amino as ids, the same nucleotides. is it identical chemistry? that would mean that rocks are going back and forth between these moons and planets and our own solar system. it happened in one place and was carried back and forth. that's interesting. what would be more interesting is discovering life with a different chemistry. if we do find something like that, that means that the universe is teaming with life. if we can find it in two different kinds of life in our

own solar system, that means there's a lot of life out there. >> a it makes the imagination wonder. earlier, the chairman, and i mean this with all the love in the world, was trying to say give me a percentage of life out there in existence. i remember doing this as sort of a sort of thought process with one of my professors many years ago. and i guess one of the mechanisms was from the beginning until today, earth has had a hundred billion species or something of that. and how many can do higher math. we would use that as sort of a benchmark. it's unknowable. of what's out there, what isn't out there. i mean, we see the world of large numbers, large planets. >> on earth, intelligence has

written several times independently. there are a lot of intelligent creatures, although none as intelligent as us. i guess on some planets there are going to be selective pressures for different kinds of things. you can be successful in life if you're strong or fast but you can also be successful by being smart. >> it's very difficult to estimate. >> it's very akin, think i, to sitting around in the bars of

europe, 1700, trying to estimate the probability that any expedition sent into the deep south, any sailing expedition, will find the hypothesized southern continent there. what other probability? you have to do the experiment. it's a reasonable leap of faith. it's a reasonable hypothesis if there's life to be found out there, even intelligent rifle to be found out there. you can sit around and have a lot of drinks out there. >> there may have been a lot of dripgs going on. thank you, mr. chairman. >> you had a wonderful

opportunity to hear habit a fascinating subject and i hope this will help with scientific sukts, as well. in case someone has an interest or wants to follow up on this, that means that you might go to our communities web site. science.house.gov. you'll hear this on the web site as well as other things that might be of interest to you all. thanks again for attending this wonderful hearing and we stand adjourned.

multiplanet species and nasa's goal of putting humans on mars in the next two decades. this is 30 minutes. thank you very much, and thanks to all of you for allowing me to be with you this morning and it kind of kick us off, i hope. i also want to thank explore mars as well as g.w. president steve knapp and scott pace of the g.w. policy institute for bringing us together for the humans to mars summit. let's leave that slide up, i'll talk about it all day long, and at least you can refer to it and you don't have to look at me. with mars making it's closest approach to effort last week and currently appearing as the brightest body in the eastern

sky during the month of april, this is an ideal time for this conference, as the red planet draws nearer to earth--sort of as -- i'm surprised she remembered, maybe i'm not surprised she remembered, but we did talk last year about my three grand daughters, the number one granddaughter being 14-year-old mckayla who wants to be the rocket scientist, who has begun telling me i'm thinking shortsightedly when i talk about going to mars. she talks about going outside the solar system. so i told her, one thing at a time. let's get to mars first. during the next three days, you're going to get an update on nasa's steppingstone approach to mars from some of the leading experts at the agency including ellen stoffen, our associate administrator operations

director, and mike gazirik, national technology space admissions director. and i will be learning and listening to all of you as you share your thoughts on the best step forward. while humans have been fascinated with mars since the beginning of time, there are a number of very tangible reasons why we need to learn more about our closest planetary neighbor, for one thing, mars's evolution and formation are comparable to earth and we know at one time mars had conditions suitable for life. what we learn about the red plant may tell us more about our own home planet's history and future and help us answer the fundamental human question does life exist beyond earth? while nasa has been on a path to mars for decades, with our earlier mars rovers and orbiters, a critical national policy statement in support of our strategy, was on april 15, 2010 during a visit by president

obama to the kennedy space center, where he challenged the nation to send humans to ans a destroyed by 2025 and to mars by the 2030s. the national space policy stayed in 2011 further supports those goals and over the past several years, nasa has been developing the capabilities to meet these goals through a bipartisan space exploration plan agreed to by the administration and congress in the 2010 authorization act and embraced by the international space community in the 2013 global exploration road map. while robotic explorers have explored mars for more than 30 years, nasa's plans for the exploration of mars begins aboard the international space station, our springboard to the exploration of deep space. even as we speak, astronauts aboard the iss are helping us learn how to safety execute extended missions deeper into

space. we're guaranteed this unique orbiting outpost for at least another decade by the administration's commitment to extend the iss until 20 in. there means an expanded market for -- microgravity and opportunities to live, work and learn in space over longer periods of time. and as most of you know, we're working to return both cargo and human launches to the iss to more than soil. the president's 2015 budget supports the administration's commitment that nasa be a catalyst for the growth of a vibrant american commercial space industry. already two american companies are making regular cargo deliveries to the space station. in fact i think most of you know we had an easter sunday delivery of dragon and it has now birthed to the international space station and will be there for a

number of weeks. while the russian space agency remains a strong and reliable partner, later this year, nasa intends to select from american companies competing to send astronauts to the station from american soil. if congress fully funds our 2015 request, we believe we can do this by the end of 2017. our next step in deep space, where nasa will send the first mission to capture and redirect ans ans a destroyed to -- returning to earth with samples. this experience in human space flight beyond the earth orbit will help nasa test new systems and capabilities such as solar electric propulsion. beginning in 2017, nasa's powerful space launch system or sls rocket will enable these proving ground missions to test new capabilities. human missions to mars will rely on orion and an evolved version

of the sls that will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever flown. i have made reference several times now to earth and the proving ground and you're here to talk about mars, so just sort of as reference to my chart, since mike's going to use it, bill is going to use it, ellen's probably going to use ill and anybody else that comes from nasa is probably going to use it because we want it indelibly emblazed in your brain. we fade are earth reliant. we are dependent on being on this planet. yet. i don't know whether buzz is going to talk to you about it later. but buzz and i agree on a number of things and one of them is that only multiplanet species survive for long periods of time. here in the western world, we think very shortsighted and some of you have heard me say this before. we think about the time in which we're going to be on this earth or which our kids or our

grandkids are going to be on this earth. many other civilizations think much longer than that. and we need to start thinking that way. we need to remember that we'dep department on a star, the sun is on a star and just like many other stars that we study all the time and many of you who follow the exploits of the hubble telescope get a picture of a star that used to be but is no longer. one of these days that is going to be the story of our star, the sun. so if this species is to survive indefinitely, we need to become a multiplanet species. one reason we need to go to mars is so that we can learn a little bit about living on another planet, so when mccaylee, my granddaughter is ready to move out of the solar system, we'll know more about this planet than we do today. mars is the steppingstone approach to other solar testimonies and other galaxies

that people have always dreamed of but frequently don't talk about. so we're earth reliant right now. and our steppingstone in the earth reliant system is the international space station. i hope i don't need to remind this audience, but i will take advantage of it anyway, because i find that sometimes people don't remember. we have now been on the international space station continuously without interlineupation for almost 14 years, continuously, without interruption for almost 14 years. everybody's excited right now because of what's going on in the ukraine, although i'm cautious, i'm cautiously optimistic because we went through this when the russians went to georgia and the station continued to operate the way it is now. we continue to operate just as we always have today with cosmos and jacsos, and esa and all of our partners. so the iss continues to move on as our steppingstone to the rest

of the coz mows. the proving ground is where we need to go. so we're going to present our case to you over these next three days and hopefully you will pummel us with questions. i'm having trouble with the lights, but i think i may see, michele, are you down there? there's michele on the third row. i know mike was here, but you should pummel us with questions about why we chose this path. there are all kinds of ways we could go to get to mars. to include those that people espouse, which is just go right now, forget about all this other stuff, just go. we don't think that that's the right idea. so we don't think we can just go, but we need to take a measured approach as we go. so we have chosen an asteroid to be our proving ground. so we can develop the technology to make it the disfans to mars, we can learn how to operate in that environment. because mars and it's moons will

probably not be like operating in lower earth orbit. we're accustomed to -- i give them the example of when i was a young snotty-nosed astronaut in camden, and i was one once. and i remember going to the johnson space center for the first time and they said you're going have a class on orbital mechanics and you're going to go over to the simulator and you're going to learn how to rendezvous and dock, i said piece of cake, i've been rendezvousing for 14 years now, i have been flying for 17,000 hours, all u you got to do is put your nose on the airplane that u you want to rendezvous with and just go. the first time i got in the simulator, the instructors, they didn't push back, they just said okay, another little snotty-nosed quid that thinks he knows everything, we'll just see. so i got in the shuttle mission stimulator and off shuttle to rendezvous with the space station or something and i didn't come within hundreds of

miles. and it was because i was flying an airplane in the atmosphere that doesn't have to worry about orbital mechanics or anything of that stuff. and it seemed like the more i fought to get there, the favorite i got away, and then i learned a little bit about orbital mechanics and how you have to do stuff. when we go to mars, we're going to find the same problem, it's not like flying in lower earth orbit. we already know that, but what we don't know is what is it like flying? we're going to use an approach to an asteroid in luner orbit, to figure out how do we maneuver out there, and we're going to in a steppingstone manner, go out and probably maneuver afternoon the moons of mars and figure out how do we get down to the planet safely with human beings? so that's sort of what we talk about as being the proven

grounds in being mars ready. and with some modest increase in nasa's budget over the years, we're going to be able to get to mars by the 2030s, president obama didn't ask us to do anything, he just tells us and we make it happen. a feet of robotic spacecraft are already around mars, dramatically increasing our knowledge about the red planet and paving the way for future explorers. the mars science laboratory, curiosity, rover, is sending back radiation data from the surface today. this data will help us plan how to proteblg the astronauts. seeking the signs of past live, also will demonstrate new technologies that could help astronauts survive on mars. engineers and scientists around the country are working hard to develop the technologies astronauts will use to one stay live and work on mars and safely

return home. this conference is bringing together the best minds to share ideas about the path ahead. it's important to remember that nasa sent humans to the moon by setting a goal that seemed beyond our reach. with mars as our focus, we're steadily building the capability to enable human missions to mars. the challenge is huge, i don't want to fool you, the challenge is huge. if you don't think so, then please listen up as we talk over these next three days. but we love huge challenges. we're making real progress right now as a radiation monitor on the curiosity rover records the mars radiation environment that our crews will experience. advanced entry, descent and landing technology are ready for entry speed testing high above the waters of the pacific ocean in june. orion ask finishing preparation for a heat shield test in

december. we're counting on the support of congress, the scientific community and all of you in this summit to help us realize that goal. the future of space exploration in my estimation the bright, but it will be up to all of us in this assembly to bring the rest of the world along on this great adventure that awaits all humanity. so with that, i'll finish my formal comments and then, do i have time for questions? can i do that? >> yes, you do. >> great. uh-oh. oh, that's okay. >> welcome to our company. >> that's all right. so i think they told me they have mikes that way and that way. right here. so if you all will come down, i'll try to answer questions that you have. and if i can't answer them, trust me, there are enough people out here in the audience, that i'll let ask and you can answer some of them.

and there are two mikes, are you all awake? yeah, come on up. >> my question's not directly about mars, but it's about, you know, human access. >> yeah. >> american human access to space. congress was not especially polite to you last time you had to testify before congress, they wanted a contingency plan about how can we quickly get american access back to space. space x thinks they can do it by 2015. i think a kosovo contingency plan if we could give them additional funding so that they're not just flying their own crews, but can in fact fly nasa crews. >> if we elected space x as one of the providers, then i would be able to do that. which haven't selected a provider yet. you may know more than i know.

i don't know that space x is the best provider. they haven't provided any human rated vehicles yet. but they're in competition, there's a blackout right now so i don't know what they're doing. we're going to select the% potential providers and we'll go with them. they may be ready before 2017, but our goal right now is to be ready by 2017. i told congress a few weeks ago, the contingency plan for rockets is years away by $10 million. and the american capability to put humans in orbit is $800 million by next year and a few years away, that's better than the contingency plan on rockets. there is no instachbt access to space on american rockets. it just ain't going to happen because we didn't pay attention, you know, years ago. >> i think part of that was congress's fault. >> i'm not going to -- i don't want to get into the position where i'm blaming congress

alone. it's been a number of administrations. the decision to do this, okay, and i'm going to help some people here who don't remember history. the decision to tart this path came in 2004, when we lost columbia, the colombia accident investigation board met and gave a report and one of my predecessors, the nasa administrator at the time said i'm going to accept every recommendation in that report. whether that was wise or not, i don't know. but that was the decision that was made back in 2004. and so we started on this path. and i think we have kind of picked it up. we have picked up the pace at least in the five years that i have been nasa administrator. we only talked about commercial cargo and now we have it. and we had no money that the administration put toward it, not even a proposal. so when the president came in, i think the first time we requested -- and congressman wolf corrected me, the first

time in the budget, although we knew we needed a million dollars, the first time in the budget, we asked for $500 million. i don't care what the administration or staffers say $312 is not 500 million. and it's not more than $500 million. so we have never gotten more than what the president asked for the commercial crew. it's my intent to get down on my hands and kneeings and beg and plead and help them understand that this nation needs our own capability to get humans into space. and we can do it. >> we have no experience whatsoever with gravity, 38% gravity as we have on mars with any biological system much less humans, so in previous conferences, i have heard american folk, european and russian all say we need to put a centrifuge on the space station and do something with mice or

something. why don't we see nasa doing that? >> well, because back when the space station was envisioned. and again, i wasn't here, so i'm going to tell you what i heard. although the plan was for a centrifuge to be on the international space station, it fell victim to what things usually fall victim to, the budget. so it just fell out when we looked at how much money was going to be available for station. but we're looking for alternative ways to do it. if you look at that chart, the proving ground, we're going to be orbiting in -- you know, in sis lunar and transorbital movement. some people will hopefully take an opportunity to drop out of lunar orbit to the surface. we have international partners who are saying we can't do it on our own, but if you can help us, we think we can get to the

surface of the moon. we have challenges going on right now, to see if commercial companies or entrepreneurs can put things on the surface of the moon. we are not going to get 4% of the federal budget. so in this group, if you are serious about wanting to go to mars, then start thinking about reality. and reality is the budget. and we are not going to get 4% of the federal budget to go to mars or any other place. so we're going to have to figure out ingenious ways to do it, based on the present budget plus some modest increases. and i think we can do it. and you all may not agree. but if you feel we have got to have the apollo era funding

levels, then forget it right now, don't even spend your time in this conference. because we are not going to get that. people told us we couldn't see commercial cargo. anybody in here who works in nasa will tell you five years ago, people said it won't happen. some of my predecessors said commercial crew and cargo, forget it. i'll give you $500 million and that's all you're getting for commercial cargo. and we took $500 million and we now have commercial cargo. so we're just saying, you know, we got some smart people too. and we do listen to you. and so that's really what we want to hear in the three days of this conference, is given the budget realities of today, how do we make that happen? and no, we won't have four slss out orbiting, there are pieces of this chart -- truth be told, okay? sometimes even we are not real

good at chartsmanship. slss are not going to be flying around mars. i know there's some purists out here who are going, look, he doesn't even know what he's talking about. he's got slss going around mars. they do like most first stages and second stages and all that, they end up in the ocean somewhere. we do know that, so don't -- humor me. question? please come -- don't let him talk all this time, just come right up. >> yes, sir, two questions actually. >> okay. >> question one, what do you say to the public when they say that nasa is dead. that's question one, after the space shuttle, that's a popular perception. and question two, please speak to education of k-20 and what you guys are going to do to help get your message out to kids. >> when people talk about nasa being dead, i say i wish i could agree with you, but we're still working really hard keeping curiosity going all the over the

lunar surface, we have orbiters that are orbiting mars right now, giving us data, we've got juneau on the way to jupiter. we have got plult toe -- new horizons on the way to pluto. we already put messages around mercury, we had never done that before. we're working with our international partners, there are 15 nations contributing monetarily to life on the international space station, we now have commercial cargo that's going back and forth to the international space station, we have three companies in serious competition to carry crew to the international space station, we hope to make an announcement, sometime end of the summer, early fall. if that's dead, so be it. i can't -- i can't help, you know, you understand. i'm a shuttle person. i love shuttles. it was time for shuttle to go w and it was time for shuttle to go long before we phase it it out. because shuttle was not -- and i know there's some shuttle people in here.

i talk to bob thompson all the time. i spent a saturday with him not very long ago down in houston over beer, you know--he helping me understand why if i had just kept shuttle going, we could have used shuttle to get to mars. that's true. we could have. you know, if we had on object fuel depots and the commercial companies were flying rockets the way that they will do someday, we could have done that a so those of you who are shuttle fans who still think it should be around, i'm not going to argue that point. like i said, there are 1,000 different ways to do what we want to do. as a marine, i was taught as a second lieutenant. lieutenant, make a decision, because if you don't, the troops are not going to follow you anywhere and they're going to leaf you at the start line. to they'll tell you their mission is over when they come back and talk about it. we made a decision, some people in this room don't like it, but we're on our way, and you can either go with us or figure out

how to start all over again, and everybody in this room i think knows what happened when you start all over again. we're favorite down this road than we have been in a long, long, long, long time. if you don't want to admit that, i can't help you. but if you stop and think about it, we never had a commercial capability to get anything to space the way we're doing today. we're oh, so close to having a commercial capability to get crews to space. and nasa is finally freed up to work with all of you to do exploration, which is what everybody in this auditorium, i hope, came here to talk about. so, you know, get over it. to be blunt. this is the path we have chosen. help us get it right. i mean we can tweak it along the way, everybody knows that, if you don't start down a road, you know, and figure out, okay, we took a wrong turn, how do you

ever get to the destination? we can tweak this, i can't tweak just constant ideas with nothing. we now have hardware under construction, we can do this. but i need your help. question here? >> exc >> that's all right. one more. >> okay. oght.>> >> michelle will answer them and bill and i will. >> i would like to put a bug inl your ear. there is an example of gravity that could operate on the space station, which has been sittingn in the wings for probably a decade. yourself or your minions reexamined the mars gravity biosatellite?bi it was a joint task between georgia tech and mitt mitt -- m.i.t. years ago. it sits in moth balls. it can be flown on small boosters. a it is a centrifuge full of micef female mice in fact. >> is that important?

>> it is for the statistics of the biophysics.ha but it can be parked outside the space station. and add the centrifuge to the space station, park it outside t theri pace station and spin it and take it out. >> that was not a question. that was a statement. get to it. >> the question is, have you tht considered it?on, t >> i didn't know about it. it tell me one more time. >> grav >> mars gravity biosatellite. >> okay. se >> the second question, is it automatically crazy to imagine e more money? we have spent monetarily less in terms for 40 years. >> yeah. >> we're now down a factor of more than two over the time of d the budgets we spent to become great in the world. there is no reason i can see why we should not redress that redre grievance, although obviously b it's an uphill battle.>> why not go for the big money?

>> well, we're going for the biggest money we think we can logically go for right now. but i just think its "unrealistic to assume that this congress, and any future congress is going to jump to 4% of gdp. i just don't think. >> 1%? >> we may get to 1%. now, 1% would be like a gold minebe. and i'm not saying -- i said a modest increase. but we have to be able to can demonstrate that we can do what we said we would do.step. commercial cargo was a first step. people said it couldn't be done. we've done it. we've got to demonstrate it we can do it consistently, you know, before we can do anythinge we're going to fly orion in the fall. that's important. that's really important. so step by step. otherwise, people are not going to -- they're just not going to

support us. thank you all very much. i really appreciate it. thank you. more now from george washington university's mars exploration summit. senior officials talked about the budget challenges nasa faces, as it tries to put humans on mars over the next 20 years. the panel is moderated by miles o'brien. this is about 50 minutes.te >> all right.l righ thank you very much, michael., a gentlemen, let's get this straight. because what michael lays out i. there is a lot of technological challenges.ogical it 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 just go today?i or iswe it impossible right now? >> i don't think it's impossible. i but we clearly need to work on > many things that we talked about. by going to mars, it's not just

going to the vicinity of mars, s but actually landing on the surfa planet. >> one way to look at it, apollo 13, with the event that it had, i believe that event and duration was around 84 hours. i we had to keep the crew alive cw for 84 hours.r 84 we have life support systems ife that if you go to wars, you havo to work for months, possibly thh over aav year, depending how lo you get there, how long you or h stay. we've got to take the steps topa be able to get that in place. that's going to take some time o to get a reliable system in place. we can landa a metric landing o the surface of mars. we know -- that's about the sizl of a mini cooper car. i think we'll all know if we re explore mars, it needs to be st bigger than that.hi we know what the challenges are. but it will take time to get the technology and capabilities ready. >> have you tim counted up how break-throughs you need to get there? >> you know, again, i'm not sur>

they're wbreak-throughs in the sense. i think we can build on what we. know now today, and just expande it. for example, life support. we have life support on the plei station.fe it's 85% closed loop.t wo but we need to push it to where it's more reliable. need doesn't require so much e maintenance, et cetera. we need to look at the ability to do repair. we're doing that onboard space station. i don't consider those necessarily big break-throughs. but we've got to get comfortable that the technology is the maturityet level is on a missio that it positively has to work. that's the way i look at the abo challenges. >> i totally agree. i think the station allows it to do that. the operation, the proving ing o ground that charlie and bill ha mentioned, that's the key. with ehave to take systems fromw days or months or weeks and turr it into longer durations. we need the time and capability to go do that. >> let's talk about, something you want to add there? >> i think we've also got to to

make sure that a every piece of technology we work on, it's sentencible to mars. that's the technology we're working on. does it really extend to mars s and can we really use it in that vision. i don't want to do the demonstrations just for demonstrations sakes. i so the example is the asteroid redirect mission, the robotic spacecraft. i've given that to the team as i design condition. that is haave bus, basic co architecture, you will use to w transport cargo to mars. now we're looking at missions built on using that as a key piece. orion and sls, we know where they're going and what capabilities they can do. how do they fit into the mars mission. so we do the next life support e system on station, it will be the life support system that we plan to put in habitation module that goes to mars.t we'll bring it out on station and then go. it's not a demonstration, let's test this, see how it works, tet

nope, we're going to actually take those systems to space andt see how they work. >> what do you see, as you work on problems, right now as you look at it, what's the hardest t problem? is it radiation exposure or something else? >> again, i think radiation exposure needs some understanding. ra there's not much we can do with the background radiation, unless we put some kind of magnetic shielding in there. some we went to the institute of medicine, asked them to take a look at our current standards m for radiation limits on standa astronauts. wer said, could we potentially push those limits a little bit. is it ethically acceptable to change those limits so we carryt for mortalityab caused by space radiation to our crews, can we m change those, alter those? al they gave us considerations to c talk about that.talk g we're pushing not only the technology that protects the human, but also looking at the requirements we have and are they really realistic requirements, or is today's medical requirement allowing us

to do things differently. >> the restrictions themselves may not be -- they might be too restrictive, in other words?d >> yes. >> and astronauts might not accept that risk. >> y >> wese have basic guidelines f the institutes of medicine of m what considerations go into that discussion. >> that solves a lot of probleo if you change the rules, doesn't it? >> we're not totally changing the rules. c but we've got the framework.the the point ruis, we're not lookig at a single solution or single s break-through. glequestion is, we're looking at all aspects of the problem to try to figure out a solution that gets us to where we want t go do. >> let's talk about iss for a minute. iss is approving ground. on the one hand sounds good.gro. budgetarily a lot might say it is a drain on the budget. does it give you more than it takes? >> i believee it does.do it forces you to make decisions right up front like the life support system.it if we make the upgrade, the liff support system, i've got a test that i e could never test.

we could test on the ground, ans what we learned with space station is we thought we had the greatest carbon dioxide system in the world. then we see out of the dust it n goes into the valves and clogs d everything up..d o on the water system, we found out that the tiegone tubing is permeable to carbon dioxide. it actually creates a nutrient rich environment for bacteria, and we had biofilm all over them cooling systems. we tested it extensively on thee ground and saw none of those problems. but going into space, and in the close loop environment, that teased out and pushed those problems. i think station can give you edo that chance to really dry run and test the equipment on orbit. but again, you don't use statiot as an ancillary, you pick pieces that are absolutely necessary and you use the unique advantages of the station to dor that. and some things are better some assessed on the ground.

you make a smart decision of what you want to do, the most cost-effective way to move to mars. >> if you didn't have the ng tow station up there, would you be looking for a capability like 't that? >> i think youhe would be spende considerable resources to get a platform to operate in, get to the station. also, don't forget the usi transportation angle as well. to we have a means to get to spacen to demonstrate technologies. the research platform that's sp already supplied, that already has crews, that already has calm, propulsion. what we found in some of our prl space tech demonstrations to focus on the money for fo technology and leverage what else is out there. as opposed to spending money t time and time again on the basic needs for operations in deep n r space. >> i think another piece on station is the one-year increment we'll do with the cre in 2015. goin we're very experienced looking w out to six months.6. we don't see anything that look problematic beyond six months. even though it's only one data point, it's still one data it si point. we look at o is there anything that