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tv   Washington This Week  CSPAN  July 5, 2014 9:30pm-11:31pm EDT

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for signs of a living universe. i am hopeful we will be doing some work not only at mars -- i love mars. been doing a lot of work on mars, but also beyond mars to the icy moons of the outer planets. >> wonderful. i think we have one more question. >> hi, folks. i am editor of arts at "the atlantic," and i have been obsessed with having you here. i'm so excited. this is not a commercial for siemens, but we were thrilled. i have been obsessing -- what is the pipeline like of younger adam steltzners out there? is the country getting it right? siemens has been simulating the software you used to do the landing, and they've gone places like cincinnati or cleveland, ohio, and i was just in worship, massachusetts. they are trying to give young
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people an opportunity to play around with this fancy software that you use. it made me think about -- is the pipeline of young talent like you there? what should we do to enhance it? if it is not, what should be? >> great question. i think for me, the key to making more people like me -- well, actually, i do that -- not cloning, but my wife and i have a whole program based on that. [laughter] i'm sure my wife is just loving that right now. over sharing, right? i think the most important thing that we can give our young people is a thirst, a drive to search for that which is awesome, that which brings awe
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and wonderment today. whether they find that in music, politics, literature, or in the sciences and engineering, i'm not very concerned because our nation is filled with inspired young people who are driven to see what they can do will be a great nation and will make the world a better place. to the extent that our efforts exploring mars, putting a rover named curiosity as our curiosity help touch that in youth, it makes me very happy and very humbled to be part of it -- touch that in youth. i look forward to any efforts we put forward to create awe and inspire our nation's youth. >> awesome. thanks so much. [applause] [applause]
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>> thank you very much, adam. thanks to all of you for allowing me to be with you this morning and kind of kick us off, i hope. i also want to thank explore mars as well as steve and scott of the gw space policy institute for bringing us together i want to thank explore mars in the space policy institute for bringing us together for the second annual humans tomorrow summit. i'm going to leave that slide up. i'll talk to it every once in a while. i thought i let you get used to it. you can refer to that. with mars making its closest to approach to earth 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. as red planet draws near to earth, nasa with your help, is drawing near to our goal of sending humans to mars. sort of as artemis, i'm
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surprised she remembered, we did talk last year about my three granddaughters, my number one granddaughter who wants to be a rocket scientist. she talks about going outside the solar system. 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 steppingstone approach to mars from some of the leading experts. nasa's chief scientist. we'll be listening and learning from all of you as you share your thoughts on the best path forward. let me set the stage by reminding us of why we're all here. while humans have been fascinated with mars, since the beginning of time.
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there are a number of very tangible reasons why we need to learn more about our closest planetary neighbor. for one thing, mar's formaking -- formation and evolution is comparable to earth. we know at one time mars had a condition suitable for life. while nasa has been on path to mars for decades. a critical national policy statement in support of our strategy was on april 15th, 2010 during a visit by president obama to the kennedy space center. where he challenged the nation to send humans to an -- an asteroid by 2025. and to mars in the 2030's. over the past several years,
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nasa has been developing the capabilities to meet those goals through a bipartisan plan agreed to by the administration and congress in a 2010 authorization act and embraced by the international space community in the 2013 global exploration road map. while robotic explorers studied mars, nasa's plan for the human exploration of mars begins in lower orbit aboard the international space station. our spring board to the exploration of deep space. even as we speak, astronauts aboard the i.s.s. are helping us learn how to safely execute missions into space. we are guaranteed this outpost for at least another decade. this means an expanded market for private space companies, more ground breaking research in science discovery and
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microgravity and opportunities to live, work and learn in space over longer periods of time. as most of you know, we're working to return both cargo and human launches to the i.s.s. to american soil. the president's 2015 budget supports the administration's commitment that nasa be a catalyst for a growth of a american commercial space. already -- two american companies are making it to the space station. we had easter sunday delivery. it is birth to the international space station. while the russian federal space agency remains a strong and reliable partner. later this year nasa intends to select from american companies competing to send astronauts to
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the station. 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 an asteroid to orbit the moon. astronauts will explore the asteroid in the 2020's. returning to earth with samples. this experience in human space life will help nasa test new systems and capabilities. such as solar electric compulsion we'll need to support human missions to mars. begin in 2017, nasa's space launch systems will enable proving ground missions to test new capabilities. human missions to mars will rely on orion and an evolved version of s.l.s. that will be the most powerful vehicle ever flown. i made reference several times now to earth and the proven
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ground and you're here to talk about mars. just sort of reference to my chart. we today are earth reliant. we're depending on being on this planet. we are not a multiplanet species yet. buzz and i agree on a number of things. one of them it that only multiplanet species survive. here in the western world, we think very short sighted. we think about the time in which we're going to be on this earth or our kids or grandkids. many other civilizations think much longer than that. we need to start thinking that way. we need to remember that we're depending on a star. the sun is a star. just like many other stars that we study, many of you who follow
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the hubbell space telescope also daily get a picture of a star. if this species is to survive indefinitely, we need to become a multiplanet species. one reason we need to go to mars, so we can learn about living on another planet. so when my granddaughter is ready to move out of the solar system, we will know more than we know today. mars is a steppingstone and steppingstone approach to other solar system and galaxies and things that people have dreamed of but frequently don't talk about. we're earth reliant now. our steppingstone 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.
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we have now been on the international space station continuously without interruption for almost 14 years. everybody is excited right now because of what's going on in ukraine. although i'm cautious, i'm cautiously optimistic. we went through this when the russians went into 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 the canadian space agency and our partners. the i.s.s. continues to move on. the proving ground is where we need to go. we're going to present our case to you. hopefully you will have questions. i'm having trouble with the lights. michelle, are you down there. there is michelle on the third
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row. michelle gates is here. you should pummel us with questions about why we chose this path. there are all kinds of ways we can go to get to mars. we don't think we can just go. we need to take a measured approach as we go. we've chosen an asteroid in lunar orbit as our proving ground. mars will probably not be like mars. its moons will probably not be like operating in lower orbit. i tell people, give them the example when i was an young snotty nose astronaut. i was one. i remember going to the johnson space center, they said you will have a class in orbit mechanics
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and go over to the simulator. i said piece of cake. i've been flying airplanes for 14 years now. i had several thousand hours. all you got to do is put your nose on the airplane you want to rendezvous with and just go. the instructors, they didn't push back. they just said okay, another little snotty nose kid who think he knows everything. we'll let hime see. i got in a shuttle mission simulator. off into the shuttle to rendezvous with space station or something. i didn't come within hundreds of miles. it was because i was flying an airplane in the atmosphere that didn't have to worry about orbital mechanics. it seemed like the more i fought to get there the farther i got away. then i learned about orbital
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mechanics and how you have to do stuff. when we go to mars, we're going to find the same problem. it is not like flying in orbit. we already know that. what we don't know is what it is like flying. we're going it use rendezvous and approach to an asteroid in lunar orbit to try to figure out how do we maneuver. we're gong to step in a steppingstone and go out and probably maneuver around the moons of mars and then figure out, how do we finally get down to the planet safely with human beings. that's sort of what we talked about the proven ground and then on to being mars ready. we think right now, with some modest increases in nasa's budget over the years, we're going to be able to get to mars in the 2030's as president obama asked us.
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he doesn't ask us to do anything, he just tells us. the mars science laboratory, curiosity rover, measured radiation all way to mars and is sending back radiation data from the surface today. this data will help us plan how to protect the astronauts who will explore mars. future missions like mars 2020 rover seeking signs of past life, 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. 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's seen beyond our reach. -- seemed beyond our reach. with mars as our focus, we are building the capability to enable human missions to mars.
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the challenge is huge. i don't want it fool you. if you don't think so, then please listen up as we talk over these next three days. we love huge challenges. we're making real progress right now as radiation monitor on the curiosity rover records the martian radiation environment. advanced entry, descending landing technology needed for landing on mars are ready for entry speed testing. orion is finishing preparation for a heat shield test in december. we're counting on the support of congress, the scientific community to help us realize that goal. the future is bright, but it will be up to all of us to bring
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the rest of the world along on this great adventure. with that i'll finish my formal comments and then -- do i have time for questions? >> yes, you have. [inaudible] >> oh, that's alright. i think, they told me they have mics that way and that way. if you all will come down, i'll try to answer questions that you have. if i can't answer them, trust me, there are enough people out here in the audience that i'll let ask. there are two mics. are you all awake?
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>> my question is not directly about mars. it's about human access to space. congress was not especially polite to you last time you testified before congress, they wanted a contingency plan. how we can get americans back to space. spacex thinks they can do it by 2015. i think a possible contingency plan if we could give them additional funding so that they're not flying their own crews and can fly nasa crews to i.s.s. >> it's one of the providers, then i would be able to do that. we haven't selected a provider yet. i don't know if they are the best provider. they haven't provided any human rated vehicles yet. but they're in competition. there's a blackout now. i don't know how they're doing. we're going to select the best
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potential providers and then we'll go with them. they may be ready for 2017. our goal now is to be ready by 2017. as i told the congress two weeks ago, the contingency plan for rockets is years away and mutlit-billions dollars. having a capability is $850 million next year and three years away. there is no instant access to space on american rocket. it ain't going to happen. because we didn't pay attention years ago. >> that was part of congress fault. >> i don't want to get in position where i'm blaming congress alone. it's been a number of administrations.
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i'm going to help people here who don't remember history. the decision to start this path in came in 2004. when we lost columbia, they gave a report. the nasa predecessor 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. we started on this path. i think we kind of picked it up. we picked up the pace. we only talked about commercial cargo. we now have it. we only talked about commercial crew, we had no money that the administration put toward it. not even a proposal. when the president came in, i think the first time we requested -- and congressman wolf corrected me, the first time in the budget, we asked for $500 million. we got $312 million. i don't care what congress says or what staff said or anything, $312 million is not $500 million.
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it's not more than $500 million. we have never gotten what the president asked for commercial crew. we really need the support of congress. it is my intent to get down on my hands and knees and beg and plead and help them understand that this nation need our own capabilities to get human into space. we can do it. >> we have no experience what so ever with gravity 38% gravity as we have on mars with any biological system. previous conferences i've heard american folks, europeans and russians all say, we need to put a centrifuge on space station. do something with mice. why don't we see nasa doing that? >> back when the space station
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was envisioned, i wasn't here so i will tell you what i heard. although the plan was for a fusion to be on the international space station. it fell victim to the budget. it just fell out when we looked at how much money will be available. 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 cyst lunar. we will be orbiting the moon. that means that, some people will hopefully take an opportunity to drop out of lunar orbit to the surface. we have commercial partners. we have international partners who are saying we can't do it on our own. 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. the u.s. government can't do everything. i said, our plan to go to mars is based on a budget that we
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propose today with some modest increases in the outyears. we are not going to get four percent of the federal budget. in this group, if you are serious about wanting to go to mars, then start thinking about reality and reality is the budget. we are not going to get four percent of the federal budget to go to mars. i think we can do it. you all may not agree if you feel we've got to have apollo era funding level, then forget it now. in't even spend your time this conference. if you feel we've got to have
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apollo era funding level, then forget it now. don't even spend your time in it 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 say it won't happen. some of my predecessor said, i'll give you $500 million, that's all you're getting for commercial cargo. we took $500 million and we now have commercial cargo. just saying, we got some smart people, too. we do listen to you. so that's really what we want to hear in the three days of this conference. given the budget realities today, how do we make that happen? no, we won't have four s.l.s.'s out orbiting. the pieces of this chart -- truth be told, sometimes even we are not real good at charts. s.l.s.'s don't go much farther in lower orbit. they do like in first stages or
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second stages. they do end up in the ocean. humor me. don't let me talk all this time. >> yes, sir, two questions. question one, what do you say to the public when they say nasa is dead. that's question one. question two, please speak to education of k-20 and what you guys will do to help get your message out to kids? >> people talk about nasa being dead. i wish i can agree with you. we're working really hard to keep curiosity moving all over the lunar surface. we've got orbiters that are orbiting mars now giving us data. we got juneau on the way to jupiter. we got pluto horizons to pluto. we put messenger in orbit around mercury.
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we put orbiters around mercury. we are working with our international partners. there are 15 nations contributing monetarily to life on the international space station. we now have commercial cargoes that's going back and forth to the international space station. we have three companies to carry crew to the international space station. we hope to make an announcement some time in the end of summer and early fall. if that is dead, so be it. i am a shuttle person. it was time for shuttle to go along before we phased it out. i know there are some shuttle people in here. i spent a saturday with him in houston over beer, he helping me understand why if i just kept shuttle going we could have used shuttle to get to mars. that is true. we could have, if we had on
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orbit fuel depots and the commercial companies were flying rockets the way they would do someday, we could have done that. those of you who are shuttle fans, who still think it should be around, i will not argue that point. there are a thousand different ways to do what we want to do. i was taught as a second lieutenant, make a decision because if you do not, the troops will not follow you anywhere and they will leave you at the starting line. we made a decision, some people in this room do not like it, but we are on our way and you can either go with us or figure out how to start all over again. everybody knows what happens when you start all over again. we are farther down this road than we have been in a long, long, long time. if you do not want to admit that, i cannot help you.
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if you stop and think about it, we never had a commercial capability to get anything to space way we are doing today. we are also close to having 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 came here to talk about it. get over it. to be blunt. this is the path we have chosen. help us get it right. we can tweak it along the way. everybody knows that. if you do not start down a road, and figure out, we took a wrong turn, how do you ever get to the destination? i cannot tweak constant ideas with nothing. we have hardware under construction. we can do this. but i need your help.
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question here. >> [inaudible] >> one more. >> i would like to put a bug in your ear. there is an example of gravity that could operate on the space station, which has been sitting in the wings for a decade. have yourself or your minions re-examined the gravity bio satellite? it was a joint task between georgia tech and m.i.t. it sits in mothballs. it can be flown on small boosters. it is a centrifuge filled with female mice. >> is that important? >> it is for the statistics. it can be parked outside the space station. park it outside the space station. >> what was the question?
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that's was a statement. >> have you considered it? >> i did not know about it. >> mars garvity bio -- mars gravity bio-satellite. >> the second question, is it automatically crazy to imagine more money? we have spent less in terms of g.d.p. on the physical sciences for 40 years and we are now down a factor of more than two over the budgets we spent to become great in the world. there is no reason i can see why we should not redress that grievance although obviously 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 it's unrealistic to assume that this congress and any future congress is going to jump to 4%
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of g.d.p. i just don't think. >> %. >> we may get to 1%. now, 1% is -- would be like a gold mine. >> indeed. >> and i'm not saying -- i said a modest increase. but we have to be able to demonstrate that we can do what we said we can do. commercial cargo was a first step. people said it couldn't be done. we've done that. we've got to get the commercial crew and we've got to demonstrate that we can do it and we can do it consistently before we can do anything. we're going to fly orrine 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 to be frank. >> thank you all very much. i really appreciate it. thank you. >> thanks. thank you very much. >> well, can everyone hear me? thank you very much.
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i want to take you on a tour really kind of like the ice landic sagas of what the science discoveries from mars, especially in the last 14 years of our program of exploration known as the mars exploration program which is implemented at our jut propulsion lab has given us. i would like to leave you with a thought that the science discoveries are real. come from a large group of scientists across universities, nasa centers, and private industry are really the impetus for human exploration of this planet and many have been working this and i hope i can give you that sense. i want to remind you of where we are. we are a long way away from mars even though we're in a close approach geometry very good for telecommunication. and it's really striking -- i reminded our administer of this about 15 years ago -- that mars is not our mother earth. profoundly different world.
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it does not read our text books. in fact, the model 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 orbitor, the landscape is changing. we don't know what we have and that's important as we look forward to the eraf o exploration. mars is an ever changing front tier. we are just realizing the questions we have to ask to allow us as aware human explorers on that surface to do the jobs we need to do so well, that situational awareness. this is a view of where we see over the curiosity and literally as we drive every day we see elements of the new mars, the same as opportunity spirit even back to viking. so let me paint that picture for you by reminding you that science organizes itself in different ways. for the last almost 20 years
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we've looked at mars science them atically through four primary themes. obviously we would like to know whether we are alone in this ube verse. this is a profound question goes back farther than we can even record in history. but getting at the question of life, active biological systems, were they ever there, could they be there is a really big question. it took humanity on earth a long time to understand the past history of life. so to get at the question of life we need to look through the record books, recording elements of climate change, change of environment, the rock record, the pages in stone that don't lie but are not always available to us. and through the preparations for having us be there to make these discoveries. so we've organized our programs. so these themes following different threads understanding the role of water, mars is a water planet we though that now, understanding whether
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there are places where that if they were here on earth could be inhabited by organisms, and finally understanding what the signs of life are and more profoundly now could they be preserved? if they were there and not preserved because they can't be what good does that do us? we need to parse that through our program. so what we've done for the last 14 years with the restructured program that some of us were so fortunate to work on was develop a robotic science exploration program. every step is driven by questions we've had, hypothesis we're testing, things about the mars we want to know to get at those themes. and 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, is about questions, measurements, approaches, vantage points. the same way we people would
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attack problems in science. so this is all about stem. it puts together the engineering, the science questions, the math, and the technology to solve problems and we've been doing that remarkably effectively our batting average is literally 1,000. many teams in the major league baseball would love to have that. we've been doing that very well since this came about. and it's a partnership with engineering. we can't do all of this without engineers helping us do that. and the fact that many of these missions survive today way beyond design life, opportunity being a good example, is really testament to that. so let me explain the discoveries we've been making. this would be the movie version. many of my colleagues would tell it much better than i with more time. first, let me remind you the mars we see is rather foreboding. it's not really waiting for us. it's extremely cold. ox diesing, can't breathe the
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air, lost its magnetic field, don't understand why the surface is covered with large deposits of dust that are very inconvenient. microen scale not good for space suits or rovers or act wutors or camera lenses. this is not the place you go for your summer vacation. scientifically though it is. and we've learned that since the first voyages of the 60s and into the viking era that it really is impressive. it's what we see and what we get are really if you will a little bit of a misnomer for what really mars has done. so we have to look at the mars today and project back in time to a planet that really we think records in its record books some things that really actually help us understand our planet earth. so let's look at it. mars has an extremely rarified atmosphere today. we talk about the tones for a guy like me would go through
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grade ynts of tens of degrees. physical to do here on earth, common on mars. even mare met yirk. the kind of liquid water we like here on earth necessary for the microbial life, can't exist today. water on the surface at least on the short term is unstable. but that could change. mars in fact does climate change really well. so let there -- water on mars and the minerals and landscapes pretty much wherever we look is there. most ouf our colleagues say we kind of knew that. thank you. the question is what does that mean? how much was there? how would that have affected geological history the internal evolution, and the looking for signs of life? any of us believe that the mars we see today at one point
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reflected a history where water was a prominent surface feature. lakes and seas if not oceans covered the lowlands. and the reason we can do this kind of study is because way back in the 0s we had the forethought to make measurements of the very fine skilled topography and character of the landscape so we can play the tape back in time and ask what it was like. does that make sense? physicses and chemistry. this also allows us to figure out the land in an engineering sense. so we flood mars. often covered with dust, the polar ice c.a.p., large basins, like we discovered in the solar system, these areas would have been under water and we see landscapes that reflect some of the signs in the rocks and landscapes that tell us this may have been the case. we're still looking for the shore lipes and how that would be reflected in the shape of the planet but nonetheless we see that.
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and then there's the question of the record of life. and on earth we sort of know that or at least we think we do. and we look back in time to the earliest times of our planet ming out of late heavy bombardment, the planet became inhabitable by the single cell world into the world we know with primenttive dna. a few billion years ago, things got a little better in terms of the atmosphere and the more complicated organisms leading up to these, eventually us, came about. so that's what we think we know very sim policically about on earth. the question is we see records of these things recorded in the rock record on our planet, which is extremely dynamic. the question is, well, could this have happened on mars and could it have been preserved? and this is a question question. the if it happened and not preserved we can't tell. how do we find out? how do we ask is the mars of today reflecting a history of this or a flat line history or an even a history of extant
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life? so what we did about 14 years ago after some setback in mars explorations in the late 90s we restructured the entire program. put the best women and men together working with our team we put together a mars exploration program driven by science with a strategy that said we'll first do the reconnaissance. where do you go? 150 million kilometers. you can't go everywhere. so let's understand where the action is from orbit, let's land where the action is and move around as if we were there. sort of apollo without the astronauts. and then get to the point where we could do insiteu analysis and return stuff from mars to earth. by the way while we were doing this we realized there were meert united states delivered to us by mars we could study and put that together to understand the planet and we have been remarkably successful. since the orbitters known as
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odyssey and then the reconnaissance orbitter, landers like phoenix and currently curiosity and of course moving on to maven which is on the way, we have really rewrib the text books. the kids of 2000, those young millenial stemmers would see a new mars in their textbooks in 2014. thing that is we didn't even know about the pail yo magnetic field back then. but these are just some of the things reflecting the data used. some telling us mars did have we think an internal dynamo. the topography that is good enough to land things on as well as following the water, understanding the minerals and context of dust, we have seen a diverse planet with complexity over time. let me just fill in the tape. and over those years what we've been able to do is increase the resolutions and the detail
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across the wave lengths of electro magnetication to save the planet. we also have a mini mars observant system in place now on the surface in orbit to study this world this fourth planet. and some of them tell us about the character of what the surface is like compositionly. others tell us about the character of the scale we could walk on. i love to tell this story. when we first put together the road map to have cameras that could see things the size of beach balls on the planet many colleagues said we don't need that. why would we want to see those things? engineers did want it i must add. but let's do other things. i can say now with some confidence that the team that were able to build these amazing instruments for orbit, the success of those have allowed us to watch ourselves drive on the planet and make choices strategically that help us with where we are. so what did we learn from all this? we started to see exposures of
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the scale we could imagine ourselves exploring relationships between rock layers to tell us of the history of water and wind involved on the surface and even the details that took place times ago. so we went from an era of first landing viking, this is viking 2 in september of 76. there's the flag of course over the mars atmosphere not quite so blue. amazing site. just a little side, the probability of landing safely in this field was about 40 to 50%. we didn't know it was a field. and so we landed anyway. pretty heroic. we landed then with new delivery systems with the air bags assisted path finding so underier which basically gave our program the vision at the surface to ask the tough questions that got curiosity to where we are. but the surface mission starting with the first lander on another planet the viking have painted a continuously
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changing picture. viking. cold, sterile, desert, super oxidents. nothing would survive that that would be related to modern biology, transitioning into the rock world mars with path finder, into the history of water world we saw and still see with the rover such as opportunity, 36 plus kilometers and driving into this world that we're now probing with new instruments with curiosity. so what have we learned? a lot. and we still have not assembled the jig saw puzzle. mars has lots of interesting variations in composition, dust storms, active surface change, on hourly scales, dust avalanches, a magnetic field, vull canism that could have been active more recently than we thought, impact crater that expose the surface. all this together with areas where we've actually seen the water. there's the little trench from our phoenix scout mission in
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2007-2008 exposing the water that we measured and verified. we've seen subsurface layering with radars that have been partnered with italy through the polar caps that show us the way that clifmente 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. but wait. there's still -- there's still a problem. first, on our nice convenient earth we have mother nature's natural force field with our great mag neato hydro dine mar, magnetic field protecting us from all the nasty stuff that you would experience if you left the protective sheetsdz. mars has relic magnetic signatures that we discovered from the mars level survivor. and we think then that mars inside versus earth is very different. we are dynamic planet exchanging energy from the
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inside-out with a dineically rotating core inducing an electro magnetic field. compasses work. 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 would like to fly to understanding this picture as it launches in 2016. but again, a different world. we also know that there's a diversity of kind of places on mars and the things you see here in terms of all these strange names of mineral phases and stuff i won't go through them at ad nauseam with you but everyone of them has a bearing on how you record the history of water and sediments that could preserve potentially the history of life. if it is preserved as organic chemicals or i should say -- yeah, organic chemistry. we've seen all these things since we began our program in 2000. and all this gives us, if you will, the impetus to want to be there, to want to touch the
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rocks that contain carbon phased molecules, to be able to go to the places with color yide that might protect places with life. we see deposits of earth in super cold dry deserts that actually contain microorganisms. so why not on mars? these become questions for biologies, not gee oljists like mist but we've been able to landscape it from time. before the floods, of early mars, late heavy bombardment all the way to the present. through the different landscapes we've measured with these powerful steps. the mars reconnaissance or bitter still relaying data is a recon asset like no other we've ever sent into deep space. and we put it in there in 2000 against many colleagues saying do you really want that? to give us the vision to be able to da that. this is a record book. like huten and smith put
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together for earth. and we've done that. we have fossil river deltas on mars. imagine what the mississippi river delta would look like in 10 million years. places that reflect the layering history of the role of water and wind working together. and we've seen that mars is pummeled by this stuff of space, our atmosphere shields us. but mars isn't. and every one of these blemishes now on the order of 250, 300 of them tell us basically about the shallow interior of the planet as it is affected by the exgenic world of space. and our planet is being hit by these. you remember february 2013 and other events like that. this is common. we have all the meteor showers. on mars, they're not showers. they produce impact events. and some of the bigger ones excavate crailters the size of football stadiums to small cities and they expose the
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shallow subsurface. and we're realizing that's important. what you see on the surface is not always what you want to see when you measure things on mars about some of these very tough uestions we're asking. we're also we've also discovered that mars has gone through major changes in the way its geeology is reflected in the rocks from the time when it was wetter, this is a paper by banfield and others. and the kinds of volcanos were explosive. to the kind that are today oozing lavas. this is a very important step. we've also seen with our mars exploration rovers a disparate history of water in the rocks thousands of kilometers apart. this is something we had not anticipated. we renamed things in different sites. we saw rocks perhaps made by vull canism and impact. and then we transitioned.
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and what we rebegan this program in 2001 we looked at the idea of bringing the best instrumentation with the most powerful vantage point we could get on the surface. we did that through a mission known as the mars science laboratory with a rover called curiosity. and the size of a mini cooper carries with it 14 experiments including ones that deal with weather and radiation forwarding for humans for dissent imaging for chemistry in different ways and she's been a beauty beyond any expectation. i'll give you a brief synopsis now. we've made more slides almost 500 giga bites of data has been released from our own self-portrait which is an interesting piece of engineering through arm and photograph with 51 frames, but the job curiosity to the measurements we've made without touching rocks by using a laser
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induced breakdown. a partnership with france to the instrument known as sam that can measure things on mars as good as the labs that measured the rocks that buss brought back from the moon we can do that from mars without bringing them home. science can now measure parts per billion at the level of detection where we can actually see that we contaminated aspects of our experiment with flowerid air. we can do that on mars. so let me remind you again we're a long way from home. as closest approach 35, 36 million miles once every 15 years. but they're small dots relative to this dust view from curiosity. so this mobile laboratory even though she sometimes moves at the pace of a giant tortoise is an amazing fete of engineering. and she sees things that amazes geeologists. these with bits of rocks, is what we expect to see when
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streams and rivers leave deposits that are then baked into stone. this is geo one here it is on mars telling us it works on mars. water flows. shallow water we know know what it was made of. we've drilled mars. these drill holes are the size of a dime but we have drilled the surface measured down sent meters collected it and made measurements inside our belly with this integrated mass speck tomorrow ter gas chrome at graph system, a lot of words for a really cool set of hardware developed and godrd and in france that allow us to measure what made the stuff here. you can see the surface materials we've excavated are not the classic brown-red or red color of mars that is almost brown. so what we've discovered on mars in 600 days of work is there are environments on mars if they were on earth were habittable. you could put microisms in there, keep the radiation down
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and we would do fine. the buildup of the kind of chemistry we know and love, this is the elementle stuff for live to do its thing. there was probably water there. the minerals and ox dation suggest there was energy even 3 bill years ago under earth. so we have found habittability works on mars. the question is what does it preserve about what might have been there? and that's the challenge we face with curiosity and beyond. one of the other things we did, not even imagine when we launched the mission. we took that rover with its mass speck tomorrow ter and we were able to use it not just what it was made of and how it got there but by using some very clever chemistry our team at cal tech and godrd were able to measure the actual age of the rock. this was a huge goal for mars as early as 2000. we now did it on mars as a side bar to what we were trying to do. we also measured the surface exposure age.
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this is really important. while the rocks are really old, older than any rock on earth, they've only been exposed for a few tens of millions of years. and what we see in those rocks exposed is very important because we now know from new labwork that's been done around our community on this mission that the base radiation, that nasty stuff that we were talking about earlier today, destroys organic molecules. if you sit them there for tens of millions of years they won't look organic. you won't know you found the stuff you are looking for. we think we understand that the materials that are buried deeper relative to these little hills are protected from space radiation relative to those that are constantly being scaveanged by the wind. so if you're trying to find organic molecules, you really can't look at the nice smooth parking lot because they'll be baked by radiation for tens of millions of years. you have to go into places
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where they're either exposed or more protected. this will be important when we start exploring ourselves. so the mars we see today is kind of like the badlands of the american southwest or ongolia, kazakstan, really rather telling layered rocks. we love them. this is an artist rendering of the what the ancient mars could have been like. the measurements we made of the ice topes of key elements from the experiment suggest that we can possibly understand the earlier atmosphere of mars to be a window into kwl it could have been inhabitable. this could help us understand what kind of place we could ask is there a record of past life? and we've done that. so the mars we see, this is it, doesn't look like beachfront terrain today, is really a challenging terrain. we've actually seen wheel wear on our rovers. we've driven across it. we know it's inhabitable.
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we what we don't know is how long that stage of habittability existed. and our science team on curiosity and the mars program is trying to understand that. was it a long period? was it a short blip? did it cycle? karl sayingen talked in much better language than i about the cycling nature of climate on mars. was it an attempt of humor at lunchtime, forgive me, not funny. but in any event. we don't know. we have more measurements to make. and that's why the rotic program, the science pushed for human exploration for us to open our eye eyes to the window is very important. we found some interesting rocks on mars that look a lot like mum fid seals you find in the ant arkic. your imagination can take you wherever you want. i found my initials many times so i know i've been there. some people think they've seen wal-mart. i will leave that to others. but more importantly, we have
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been pursuing this line of reasoning, we have found the water. water altered rocks, ice. we have discovered that there are inhabitable zones in mars, certainly from the crater from curiosity, obviously with opportunity. even evidence from the prior mission. we're still looking for this one. this is elusive connecting these things up to there. and maybe it will take this. maybe we'll get so far and then it will take the humans. but this record of potential biology, particularly the record of past life, a's we think will be a better hypothesis to test scientifically. is really important. so we've made great progress. the question is how can we use this wave of science, this era of almost renaissance like discoveries with a large community literally more than a thousand scientists across the universities and other institutions of working mars now, we've built you have that
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community internationally. how can we use that to ensure the sustainment of this questioning regime to transition into human exploration? so i leave you in the next five minutes with my final thoughts. first, unfortunately it's not easy. we've all heard mod and pod spoken in different languages. and whatever. but we really want to see whether there's any record of the kinds of carbon that would record the signature of past life in the chemistry, and understand whether that and how that links to modern life. and this diagram of one of our best and brightest young scientists kind of shows all the action. and we don't know how things are escaping from mars. we haven't understood how the surface water perk lates in gullies. we don't yet know if there are brine flows. we think maybe. the questions raised here about how all this stuff cycles, whether the carbon goes through a long cycle, whether it's mineralized we've got to get at that if we're serious. and maybe it will take human
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exploration to tie that together. some colleagues believe these recurring slope lynn yea otherwise known as changing things made these throws of brine salty waters that erupt during times when they're favorable. alfred and his team have found these in multiple sites. could they be access to the shallow subsurface where there's reservoirs of these fluids? we don't know. our next mission on the way maven, a lot of people ask another orbitter? don't we want more rovers? and we would love more rovers. but this mission is all about the key question from mars that links to earth. how has it lost its atmosphere? because it's done that. the mars atmosphere today is not is the prime oirdal one. and earth recycled itself and became habittable oxygen yated and favorable. mars may have been. the mission with lockheed martin with instruments all over the world is going to address that question and after
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it does that and it asks primarily how an atmosphere that today is rather unbreatheably co2, nice for plants but not so much for us, how it has evolved in time by reading the record of what is happening today in situ through various experiments even mass speck tomorrow ter and how it might have gotten to this stace what that would inform us about mars and link it to the history of earth. this is a po found mission. the mission was selected competitively on the basis of science and engineering. and that's how we do things in science. kind of like the stem oh limb picks. but good stuff. so of course this is curiosity taking a little selfie. so maven will do that and already we know from curiosity measurements with the team that the record of this critical ratio that tells you about escape rates for atmospheres, for mars versus earth, is different. this is the new number, the range of uncertainty from
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viking, very good measurements. this is what we thought we would see and this is what we got from one data point from curiosity. we want to fill in how it might have gone from this to there. and there's a trend here. these are big changes. we need to get at that. and maven will do that. and after maven does its science for nearly 7 o 00 days we can use it as a satellite. using the electro payload to allow us to talk to rovers and other things on the surface. so our program is integrated the way human exploration will be. so big final thing i want to leave you with, this is what we're up against on mars. 10,000 feet of layered rock taken at 600 days to get halfway into this zone here. we want to get up into there by the end of the curiosity mission. it's a long drive through rough terrain. some of our best astronauts will tell me they could probably walk it in a day. it's taken us 600.
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so different economies of scale and efficiency. of course getting a person there is different than sending a rover. so i leave you with a couple of i hate to use these diagrams but i do love them. i took much basic in science sorrifment it's a science-driven program asking questions like curiosity is what nasa science direct rat does. we are leading to humans to mars. this is not a new chemical. but it is in fact humanors to mars cht and this would be a kind of goal that it would be discovery, expersontial, open to serendipity by having human people -- women and men in contact with the science not multilight minutes away. we haven't done this before. it would be different than apollo because the people would be on their own adapting because of light times away. and this is what we're doing with the space station and the next steps beyond that.
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we put these together all moving toward this goal. this is the key first step together with that. and you've heard that today. so how will we look forward people? final point. is there's lots of opportunities. one way is to use the kind of telescience that we've already used in the ocean. this is just an artist rendering of how robots on the surface with people in a large laboratory in orbit could operate and do the kind of things we want. there's different models in human exploration with different roles for people. they're all good. choosing the one is not so important now. it's more important to get the people there with the questions to ask that science is informing. and this partnership that i've been talking about all the time where the 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 important. people bring skills that our robots, however we build them, how long we take, will never catch up to.
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i mean, we will always be able to adapt sometimes nonlinearly, differently than our robotic warriors. and that's good. it's the partnership that matters. and so i finish with a couple of thoughts. we're here. and here. this is a cool rock i really like. there's curiosity. we want to be here. a couple of women on the rim of a crater doing science, biology, climatology, this is a big step. this is going to get that. so i would like to leave you with two thoughts. science has given us the ammunition of what we want to know when we go. i think the program will continue through our mars 20 rore and missions in the 20s to open the door to what we're going to need when we get ourselves there. and that will change everything, folks. this will be like the columbus moment when people, women and men, touch mars themselves with the robotic tools to ask questions 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.
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it's a discovery engine. let's keep going. thank you. [applause] so i'm told i have limited time for a question. and remember, i'm one guy representing a science community of thousands. so don't pummel me with too much. one question. >> ok. thank you. you have mentioned some on inhabittability. you talked about organic that would be the next step looking for life. we have a mission in europe. we search for organics and positive signs of life. so what is the plan in the u.s. and what is the next mission that you think we need before we go with humans? >> thank you. and jim will be talking about the whole program this afternoon. he's the division director. i'm just a mars science geek.
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but good question. the mission is actually that leap to the subsenior you are fass that we've all been waiting for ever since i was on viking as an intern to get below the depth where the inizing radiation, the gal act tick concentration will modify the chemistry. at least we think that depth. by sampleling that stuff by the pay load, together with instrument developed in germany and godrd, we will look for organics for the first time directly in the context of geeology chemistry physics. so it's a key step beyond everything i will show you. and the potential discovery in the mission with russia and other partners is critical. as will the mars 20 rover. so bernard's question is valid. as we look at all this stuff going on, we're not done. the programs have to keep going beyond maven and inside to look at the seismic and background on mars. there's xo mars mission 16 to
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look at the chemistry, there's our mars 20 rover. and then there's the 20's open to all the young stem people here. so bernard, excellent point. we're really thrilled to have the partnership with have with this next generation rover whose possibility is horizontal and subsurface. today the drilling gets us this deep and it will stop at 50. so we want to go -- i'm not six feet but we want to go two meters. and bernard's mission and iso's mission will get us there. so folks, science lives. thank you. >> 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 if you're keeping score. can we go to mars today in a perfect world if we had a blank
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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 many of these things that we talked about. and by going to mars it's not just going to the vicinity of mars but actually landing on the surface. i think entry, descent and landing will be a challenge. >> i think one way to look at it. apollo 13 with the event that it had, i believe that event in duration was around 84 hours. we would to keep the crew alive for 84 hours. so we have life support system that if you go to mars have to work for months possibly even over a year. we have got to take the steps to be able to get that in place and that's going to take some time to get a reliable system in place. entry, descent landing as we mentioned. that's the most we know how to do. that's about the size of a mini cooper car. i think we know if we're going to explore it needs to be something bigger. so we know what the challenges
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are but it will take some time to get those ready. >> so if we counted up how many break throughs do you think you need to get there? >> again, we ought to talk about it i'm not sure they're break throughs in a sense. i think we can build on what we know now today and just expand it. so life support, we have life support on station it works pretty well. it's 85% close loop but we need to push it to where it's more reliable, doesn't require so much maintenance, et cetera. we need to look at the ability to 3-b print parts. we're doing that on board space station. so i don't consider those big break throughs but we have to get comfortable that this is really the maturity level that you're ready to use it for this mission where it absolutely has to work. so that's the way i look at the challenges. >> i totally agree and i think the station allows us to do that. the proving ground that charlie and bill had mentioned that's the key. we have to take systems from
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days or weeks and turn it into longer durations. and we need the time and capability to do the that. >> i was going to add that i think we've got to also make sure that every piece of technology we've worked on it's extensible to mars. and that's the judge of the technology that we're working on. does it really extend to mars and can we use it in that vision? i don't want to do demonstrations just for demonstration's sake. i want to be putting systems together that we can actually use for mars. so the example is the asteroid redirect mission, the robotic space craft. i've given that to the team as a design condition. that is the basic architecture you will use to transport cargo to the vicinity of mars. now we're looking at missions built on using that as a key piece. so we know where they're going and what capabilities they can do. how do they fit into the mars mission. so we look at everything. we do the next life support system on station. it won't be for the station.
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it will be the one that we plan to go to mars. so we'll bring it out on station and go. so it's not a demonstration. we're going to take those systems to space and see how they work. >> what do you see -- and as a work out problems this can change but as you look at it what's the hardest problem? is it radiation exposure or something else? >> i think radiation exporesure needs some understanding. there's not much we can do with the gal ack tick como radiation unless we put some kind of magnetic shielding in there. we are approaching it several ways. we asked the institute of medicine to take a look at limits on astronauts and said could we push those? is it ethically acceptable to change those limits so we carry for mortality caused by space radiation to our crews? could we change those and alter those? and they gave us conversations to talk about that. so we're pushing not only the
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technology that helps protect the human but also looking at the requirements we have and are they really realistic requirements or is today's medical environment allowed us to do some things differently? >> so the restrictions themselves may not be -- they might be too restrictive. >> and astronauts mine might sign up and accept that risk. >> and we've got now basic guidelines from the institute of medicine to what conversations go into that discussion. >> that solves a lot of problems to change the rules. >> we're not fully changing the rules but we've got the framework. but again the point is we're not looking at a single solution or a single breakthrough the question is we're looking at all aspects of the problem to try to fig crur out a solution that gets us to what we want to do. >> let's talk about iss for a minute. iss ask a proving ground on the one hand that sounds good. a lot of people would say budget terrell iss is a drain on the budget is a problem. does it give you more than it takes? >> i believe it does.
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i mean, it force youse to make decisions right up front like the life support system. if we make that the life support system, i got a test bed we could never test. we've got a test on the ground and what we learned in the spation station we thought we had the greatest system in the world. we find out all this dust actually moves out of the catalyst bed goes into valves and clogs everything up. we also found out in our water system that the tubing is permable to carbon dioxide so it goes into the water system actually creates a nutrient rich environment for bacteria and we have biofilm all over inside our cooling systems. we tested extensively on the ground and saw none of those problems. but by going to the environment of space and being in the closed loop environment where the levels are higher here on the earth, that pushed those problems. so i think station can give you that chance to dry run and test the equipment on orbit. but you don't use station as an
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answer larry or piece. you pick pieces that are absolutely necessary and use the unique advantage of station and some things are better tested underground. so you make a smart decision what you want to do the most cost effective way to keep moving towards mars. >> if you didn't have the station up there would you be looking to make a station or some capability to do that? >> i think you would be spending considerable resources to get a platform to operate in, to get to the station also. don't forget the transportation angle as well. we have a means to get to space to demonstrate technologies. so the station provides a research platform that already has crew, propulsion. what we found in some of our demonstrations is the focus on the technology and try to leverage what else is out there. spending money time and time again on the same kind of basic needs for operation in deep space. >> i think another piece on station is the one-year increment we're going to do with our crew members next year in 2015. we're very experienced looking out to six months we don't see
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anything that looks problematic beyond but even though it's only one data point it still is one data point that says is there anything that starts occurring beyond the pired. we've looked at it before. the russians have flown several year-long missions. but i think it's time we look at it with the tools we've got today to see if there's anything in the human system that changes to see if there's something that is continuing that hasn't reached steady state in terms of human degradation. >> so how important is it to simulate a mars mission? and how close to do you have to make it to a real mars mission to be of value? do you build in the communication delay? do you block the windows? how do you design something like sna >> it's interesting. we've talked about that. we do some things now. we do a lot of procedures now on board station that are autonomous where the crews actually do the operation without any ground involvement.
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that was geared specifically towards mars environment where the time delay doesn't allow the ground team to interact with the crew. so we're doing those. we've talked about taking away the windows and taking away communication time. >> i bet they've love that. >> they don't like that. what's interesting they say to go to mars they're willing to put up with all these stressors in their life but just to do 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 a marathon yesterday. how many do you have to run before you're really ready to go to a marathon or are you good enough maybe running ten miles or 18 miles and then ready to do it when it's time to do the marathon. so i think the trick is not do so much that you've reduced all the risk to vore. we will not reduce all the risk to zero. but to reduce it to a low enough level that we're ready to give it a shot and we have a reasonable chance to pull it
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off. but it will not be risk free. >> among your challenges i didn't see the psychological issues as one of the issues. that's probably more in your bailiwick. the mars 500 experience and what they've done they've tried to delve into this but there's some big challenges. >> we have some good studies 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. there's a real tie between the human and where you are. but then when that planet -- and we've got pictures from the rovers again looking back at the earth and this 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're talking about moving humans into deep space. i'm trying to change the discussion a little bit. we talk about as exploration. i think about going investigating and then coming back. i think we need to start talking about it in terms of
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maybe pine niring where we're actually going to potentially stay. and that really starts changing the dynamics. so the investment in mars is so much we don't want to do this as a one-time mission. we want to have the infrastructure there and think about this as actually moving human presence off the earth into the solar system. >> i think he said it very well and that's the part is building the capabilities that are extendable as we go to mars. >> i think about history here. and you think about the voigs voyages. and somebody going to mars is going to have more contact with earth or the home port, if you will, than some of those voyages. do you use those historical parallels as you inform your decisions about how to handle this? >> i think again historicically we ought to discuss a little bit is the difference when you do trestral big voyages, you still have oxygen to breathe,
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you still have water you can drink. you can bring some food with you. when you got to where ever you're going you could grow plants. when we start becoming in the charts i say mars ready or earth independent. when we bring that tie to the planet that's a different dimension. you have to carry with you or have to have enough assurance that you can use the carbon dioxide environment of mars to generate oxygen. can you get water out of the environment? you're going to have to really prove that some of those thing that is are there. so again i think trestral exploration was a little different because it wasn't quite the level of what we're doing here where we're essentially putting a human into an environment that the human cannot live on its own and we have to carry with it enough support capability to keep the human alive and functioning. >> how much of that ability and -- and feel free to come to the microphone. how much of the ability to live off the martian land do we have
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to prove before we put people on the surface? >> so there's been a number of studies on that that show that if you can do institute resource utilization, that is get your water, get your -- get oxygen you can get water, fuel, you can get air to breathe. that show that the amount of mass really becomes a mass problem. how much do you have to take with you and how much can you rely on when you gt there? i think one would argue if we're going to rely on a system you would it to be there ahead of time, you want it to be reliable and be able to store the oxygen so you know it's there. i think that would be the most prudent step to do. we aren't there yet but we are taking the first step in mars 2020. >> so that would be advanced missions, these autonomous vehicles would literally create, at least prove if not create a store. >> one advantage we have maybe historicically we can send scout missions ahead of time that the other early explorers knt.v that capability. but the points out the
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environment is so harsh and extreme. >> but the ideas when you put those scout vehicles there they ought to be generating resources. again i can in this constrained environment we have to make sure everything we do is extensible to the next step. let's just do a demonstration and put a little oxygen. i want to actually build enough that could be potentially used and play forward in another scenario. >> as you paint that picture, and i think you've done a nice job kind of pulling together a lot of these disparate elements in a way that provides a cohesive narrative and i hope that plays well on capitol hill as you try to sell this program. and what's interesting about it. it's kind of like we all think about success in space as a polo. and there was a deadline and a commitment a cold war, all these things lined up. and we perceived that the way to go to space. if you don't set a date and go
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and be there by then. this is a little more like it seems to me an interstate system. there's 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. but what it offers is sustainability. and i guess that's a long way of me saying that this is a nuanced story. the how can we convey that story to people who are left out and to what nasa is doing right now? or is that my job? >> that's your job. >> ok. but i would say it's really -- it's all of our job. right? >> we need to look at what we're doing today and then describe it in a way that really makes sense. we just flew this thing called vedge which is going to grow plants in space. we brought a bunch of plants before. this is the first time we're growing plants for the crew to eat. so this is not for a science
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experiment to see how the plant will grow in microgravity. this is actually food for the crew to augment their diet. so this is the beginning of starting to push us off of the earth into space to go do things. it's a small thing but we ought to be talking about it. >> it's a big thing. if we could print a pizza they would be really happy. >> we're working on it. >> but those pizzas would be tough to chew on. >> 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. but i don't know if we have the luxury to do that right now with budgets and forecasts and where we are. but we still can get there. and i think we've got to take successes in the steps along the way, whether it's growing plants, propulsion, better eba suits, orry i don't know,
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better entry landing systems, we're going to be moving the needle forward we've got to paint it in the right context with as few power point charts as we can. but that's the keefment >> you had three tracks but 51 f one of those charts is five in one. but -- >> you know, you get the sense that if you talk about them long enough maybe it could become a reality. but we do have the fundamental issue of dollars and cents here. so if you take that vision, that narrative and you jive it with what the money is right we get to hen do mars? as somebody said last night, it will be 20 to 30 years. but we've been saying that for 20 to 30 years. so if you do the math i don't think we ever get there. so how do we reconcile that vision with the -- with what congress and the american people have put on the table for nasa? >> you know, i think again the
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way i lay it out and have talked about last week is we cannot do it at the same budget level we're at today. this is just not going to work. and the current budget has a 1% increase. it's going to need more than that. so there's a modest increase but we need to show the congress and show folks if we get this additional funding here's the advances we can make, here are the pieces that are there and show how we're not just doing a demonstration but this piece fits into the mars capability puzzle this way. and if we make that maybe we can continue to break that paradigm and get some funding to move forward. we need to look at what we can do internationally. our partners are very interested in doing this activity. can we leverage off their work and likewise the preist sector. there's tremendous capability with cargo resupply and crew going to station but can we start extending that or expanding that into the ploreation dome main. >> the one thing i will add i
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think the other thing that is a little different is you see the mission direct rats of the corps working together. we have work that's going to mars on the science mission direct rat feeding forward. the technology that we're doing for my biggest customer and john gruns felled the other biggest customer along with the broader community working together to get technologies feeding into those missions. on our side, and this is kind of a down and dirty of it, we're trying to work with other partners, other government agencies on the technology pieces that will feed into it. it's going to be a story but we can work on the pieces and leverage other investments. >> and it's going to be hard. that first chart looks good when we're working together but to do that you're giving up control. i'm going to be doing more than the science mission direct rat would like to do on mars. i would like to take a much larger object to look at entry
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descent and landing, probably have more capability than a science mission needs. but if we do two separate missions, the cost is some larger number. but if we can integrate and be willing to give up the perfect human mission and the perfect science mission but by together we're advancing human space flight that's how we win. so we've got to figure out a way we don't look at it from each one of our little stove pipes but a way holes scli we can work together to do this. the challenge is big enough. it's not going to be solved by any mission director by itself. ite's got to be the whole of the international community pulling together as well. >> i would think getting to mars would be easier than getting the nasa aa's together. is that an accurate statement? >> i don't know. i don't know about that. >> you're not going there. >> i'm not going there. >> we've got a question. go ahead. say who you are, please. >> yes. steve brody from international
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space university. throughout my time at nasa and i'm sure yours as well, there's occasional wild cards that help you along and sometimes present additional challenges. one thing i'm thinking about is the infusion and or offer of significant private resources from some individuals very deep pockets. we've had now very real win-win with the commercial cargo and hopefully that will continue with the commercial crew. but how do you see -- do you see any other -- through conversations you've already had or sensed any major contributory contributions from either individuals, companies, or whatever that will really get that sin jistic principle and give you more than what you've got now for the program
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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's folks, space x signed an agreement to look at engine work. jeff has also been looking at engine work. so where that's been the do main of the government to work on some new engine capabilities some is picking up with private sector money. so we need to watch for those and look forward. we did some interesting things that's the system that takes carbon dioxide from the carbon dioxide removal system combines it with waste hydrogen that comes off the water that generates oxygen and makes more water and creates methane as a waste gas. instead of buying that as a
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system we didn't pay for any of that as a development we just agreed to pay for the device. we said we're going to pay you 10,000 per pound for water generated on station. if you don't generate any water you don't get any pay but if you do you'll get paid for this amount at this period of time and they were able to do the development up front for that system and it's been working well on board that station. so are are there any models we can leverage and find things they want that beb fit us. so we've got to continue to look at that and don't always assume it has to be the government doing this. >> a similar story. when we see interest in high power propulsion not only for a cargo tug for future exporation, for moving the astrides, but we see it an interest in the commercial space craft indtri. can we leverage that interest? we think we can. in ooptcal communications,
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laser come from geosink nist orbit that has incredible interest for other and government and cable operators and getting content up to those satellites can we leverage that interest. we think we can. >> what is the right mix on that? can we get to mars? there are certain things that there will never be a business case for. to what extent do you have to go to business and to what extent are they coming to you snr ring the answer is yes on some things like optical come or green propel nt in the replacement of hydrozine, solar elect tropopullings there's commonality. other areas maybe not. entry, descent is a little unique. >> hard to sell that to an auto maker. >> i don't envision another
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space station beyond the space station we have today. i see it picking up the next generation space station in lower orbit. i see our space station today as a chance for them to experiment with what might be helpful in the drug world, the biological world or materials world. there is something here that gives me an insight into the physical process, i would like to be able to do that. we have been able to have access to cargo and crew so it's not cost-prohibitive. maybe a single purpose laboratory now is the answer in the environment. we don't have to replicate? i of that in any of our future plans. so i'm hoping that we use station to be that next piece and this extension of station after 2024 gives us the fighting
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chance to expose a broader community beyond aerospace an opportunity to do aerospace. >> having another 10 years to do that was a significant thing, a huge thing i think. is it enough time for you? we're talking a pretty long time prime. 20 years from now will you be wishing you had it there? >> i say use what you can. the big thing is it really changed the environment for the commercial sector. when it was going to end in 2020, i couldn't get any commercial company to think about doing anything with space research. the focus was too short. just that four more years to 2024 has really changed the commercial sector's perception of what space is and how to use it and they can go directly and get private services now to take private cargo up. eventually they'll have crew.
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so they're starting to say lei, this isn't such a foreign environment to us, we're willing to invest. when that tipping point kind of changes, where now the private sector doesn't see that as something so risky that only governments can do, and they see that turning profit or lowering use of resources in space, then i think you start seeing a much broader base building to go forward. >> it was hard to regain the confidence of the commercial sector and the academic world, too, after all that happened when the science budgets were cut dramatically. >> and we're slowly getting that back again, but you're right, they're skeptical. if you talked before about being sustainable and building plants and processes that can take the storms that come when we have a sequester and doesn't fall apart, if we've got a plan that is making measured, sustainable progress, i think that's how we ultimately get to
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mars. >> we have a question over here? >> my question has to do with the slide that's been shown twice now recording the proving ground missions. those are beyond low earth orbit and said one to 12 months. i'm interested primarily prosecute the biomedical challenge side be things. is there currently a plan in place for the proving ground mission of 6 to 12 months? if so, what does that plan entail? >> around the moon we're looking at potentially a crew-tended capability, a habitation module. again, i don't see it as a moon attended module. the idea is to take this life-support system that we worked on space stations, in a mars class station and put it into a true space station and stick it around the moon. that enables a lot of lunar
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activity. it's a base santo operate and do those activities. you can guess nice view times of the south pole, north pole, and the moon. telerobotic things. we've drisken rovers in california to see how you could deploy those on the far side of the moon the the other thing if you think about it is we talked about maybe prepositioning hardware around the cars so you will launch a component with a life-support system. it spends a year journey to get out there now, it's in the martian environment and then doesn't get activated for another year. sometimes our systems are not so good just sitting around. there proving ground lets us put a laboratory around the moon and where we visit it every couple months it actually looks at how we shut that system down and activate it again. it helps us get ready for mores.
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>> if in a perfect world with unlimited money, would it help you to land on the moon? or would it be a detour that would just kind of suck resources, time, whatever? >> the challenge of course is it doesn't have much of an atmosphere. the lunar lander would be chemical. i'm not sure -- >> as the president said, been there, done that? is that the way you look at it in >> i would say not quite so much but in charlie's talk somebody asked him about partial gravity, and that's the advantage you get on the moon. by being on the surface of the million up get to see the environment. >> but can you interpolate to mars? >> i think you can. we would like to get some data there. we have some small centrifuges on station where we can look at things at the cellular level and small plant level and i
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think that will give us some indication is there a problem in this level the i don't think it's worth the expense right now of going to the moon. unless this research on station points to us seeing a huge problem or consideration we have to deal with. >> and there are certain, you could imagine, capabilities, telerobotics, but also again private partnerships and organizations, there are some ways that perhaps we can partner in a very smart way to go do that. >> and in this proving ground, if our international partners really want to go to the surface of the moon, great, let them go do that or if our commercial partners see an advantage to using lunar surfaces for activities, that's fine. we'll support them. but we should be aware of the environment we're in and leverage off the other activities that help us.
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>> so we figure out a way to partner with the chinese? >> i think the chinese will be a key player somewhere? this -- somewhere in this situation. so i can't imagine we don't work with them. >> we partner with the chinese? >> i can't answer that and still continue to sit on this stage. i'll be teleported to mars momentarily if i o any real answers! >> glen? >> my name is greg cecil and i'm a former space shuttle worker and now a middle school science teacher down in florida. my question is constellation was set up by the bush administration to take us to the million and mars and beyond. unfortunately whether the new administration came in, that was cancelled. my greatest fear is now that you have an idea of what you want to do, you have a road map set up with s.l.s., if we have a new administration come in to power in 2016, 2017, will we have
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everything scratched again and starting from base zero? has nasa considered that and worried about that? >> i would say yes. we're really working with that on sls. a test in december is going to look at the heat shield performance. that's essentially 80% of the software we'll fly on space x explorations around the moon. the actual dome for 2017, space one, is actually manufactured in new orleans. we're putting in a large machine and will actually start building the tanks down there. we're working on the exploration upper stage for the mars class mission. so by the time we get to 2016 we're going to have significant hardware, in fact we do today, that you can go out and touch and see. what we're doing, if somebody decides they want to
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revector and do lunar activities, they can, but we're staying focused toward mars, destination independent but capability driven and try to make that point to the next group that comes in with an idea, ok, we understand what you would like to do, we've created enough flexibility in the division to let us change it a little bit but don't lose where we're going. >> how much metal do you have to bend? how many congressionally linked jobs do you have to have before you have inertia for a program so it sustains itself? what does it take? >> if i could answer that, i'd had a ph.d. >> have i one and i can't answer that either. >> why can't we do space -- >> one other thing, we also do ourselves a big disservice, right, because we argue with
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ourselves about the perfect plan. right? and at some point that's not helpful. the problem is that the outside world sees these supposed smart people all arguing, so there must be something that isn't right. then they kind of go, wow, we don't really want to go do that. we need to make sure we don't get caught up in trying to make, find the absolute perfect plan that doesn't sustain itself. can we all get together as a community and recognize that sustainability is important? >> question over here the >> hi. harry singer the going back to the origin of nasa and its predecessor, in fact, and also s 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.
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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're talking about now over 40 years later. what consideration has been given to thermonuclear which we had developed then? ou mentioned electric but it's a low thrust system that takes longer for mission. >> yeah, i think we're still living on the shoulders of
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giants, and you are one of those giants. because many of the technologies and capabilities we have were either proven now -- every time we come up with a new system at lanning, i always ask, was this done in the 1960's? every single time, it's all been done. all been done. so the nuclear thermal, i agree, it was a really push forward in a significant way in the 1970's. most of the trade studies we see to go to mars including the ones in space tank say that nuclear thermal is probably the best means we have to get there as quick as we can. helps with the crew, helps with radiation. so it is a question of investment, priority, and when do you invest and how much and when do you do it? we have modest investments right now in it. we kind of tried to make sure we're not overlapping, right? there's modest investments there to keep the system alive
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and when we can get the right budget and right time, many would argue that's the way to go. >> i think it was unfortunate calling it the fukushima engine though. wasn't that a bad idea? >> frankly, i just don't see we're going to get there in 30 years the way it's going. you say 30 years, gee, we were doing it in 1970. >> there are some that would argue that in cryogenic propulsion, in a very narrow case you can do it but to get there repeatedly, we got to get back to that. >> so we're a little short of time. kind of getting down to the five-minute realm. if i could is you -- ask you to get right to your questions so we can get a few more in. go ahead, sir. >> yeah. you guys are coming a long way and have from some of the answers, very good, working with the private sector but
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there is still this learning that needs to occur, maybe not so much at nasa but on the hill and the staffers and people up there as to the fact that the private sector, not just commercial but the private sector is going to be maybe starting slow but going faster and faster and faster and there may be times where they get ahead of you the you can see some of these billionaires pull together and actually do a mars mission that could go faster. wouldn't is it be i good idea to have sort of an annual review where the nasa and leaders in the private sector sit down and maybe coordinate these things? because it's going to happen, they're going to get faster and faster and faster. you might get there second. >> that sounds like a reasonable thing. >> because i think again, kind of back to the other discussion, we've got to make sure we're not just talking to ourselves all the time. we need to go back -- look and
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say make 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 clearly take more risks. they have significant investment funds. it might be helpful to have a broader forum or expand this human-to-mars workshop to include a broader community. >> yeah. if you get there second you still need to make it look like a victory. >> quick question, please? >> yes. excellent point from the gentleman who brought up the alternative of nuclear thermal propulsion kind of a related question. why is there so much of a focus on solar-electric propulsion? >> the focus on solar is a couplefold, right. one, for the astral retrieval mission, into the proving ground in deep space, it has the capability and it's the
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most efficient form of transportation really out there in space. we think about transportation on earth. we have tugs, barges, facilitate eagles. s.e.p. is very efficient. we think it's ready for the next step. we can leverage it with different industries. it's the next one we can push over the needle. the space tech came out with high priority. it enables exploration. >> i think a big piece is really what mike was pulling on. it has more application than just to nasa and to just our mission. to get high-power solar rays is important to the solar satellite communication industry. it's not just nasa pushing this for our own needs. another piece, the higher powered thruster to replace liquid apogee morts, this is a part of that piece. is this is a way to leverage
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off what commercial is already doing and moving forward. in the nuclear propulsion area it's pretty much us alone pursuing it. there isn't yet a private sector play-action for that class of rocket but we need to keep investing in the technology and take the work that was done back in the 1960's and take it that next step. because we know a lot more about control systems now. computers are much more sophisticated. we can take some of that and move it forward at the right pace. but this isn't something uniquely needed for us. it can be shared. >> this is key, again, not trying to did it all ourselves and trying to be smart about it. one of the challenges is the ability to store liquid hydrogen. it's not only good for cryogenic storage, but for thermal too.
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we're trying to take the common pieces today. >> yes? >> 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 h.l. 20 derived from the boar 4 photograph and a lot of wind tunnel tested and it was part of a program and it was put on the celestial. jim benson bought it and now mark 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,
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bigelow. just several days ago we had a giant thinker leave us, john heubolt, and he was a great rogue model for me and i hope that some of the thoughts that i come up with can in some way mimic what he's been able to do. at the moon we had a free return trajectory, and we modified that once the s.b.f. was working. we were always in a relatively close lunar-earth orbit. and apollo 13 indicated that we could 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
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rescue ability. why don't we do like many other industries do instead of one big large thing that could fail? why don't we have two small things like fighter airplanes, they fly in formation. if one can't do the job, the other one can. sure, you could do them but leave a staging orbit at five pliles formation difference or 10 miles. now, wait a minute, don't be so stupid, why don't you put them together in the staging orbit and have them fly out. now you can jettison 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 break into mars orbit? does it have the ability of doing that?
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when i look at what i need at mars, i need landers, and landers are capable of aerobraking and transporting people from one position to another and bringing back people. i don't know who is here from lockheed but i got to ask the question, why do we need rion in mars orbit? i really don't believe that that's the case. i have 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 in the large vehicle and a landing vehicle just as well as in rion?
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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're going to look at that on space station with beam in 2015. we're going to look at expandable technology to see what advantages that gives to us. it's reported to have better thermal conditions, the larger volume allows you to put water in for better radiation. that's a good thing. to buzzs point, we're looking at what we call evolveable and modular architecture for mars. so it's along the lines of what buzz is talking about. we may preposition a habitational module around mars ahead of time and do a rendezvous with that.
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that's your return vehicle so instead of looking at a single monolithic kind of mission we're looking at, we call it evolveable where we position pieces up front and also call it modular because we're trying use similar components. can we take advantage of the natural satellites around mars and use those in the mars architecture and use a piece of those for what we are trying to go do? we're looking a lot at high elliptical orbiters. we're starting to take a different approach toward mars than we have before. our classic missions were more apollo style in a way where we launched everything in a campaign in a year.
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sent the armada of space craft you saw toward mars. i think we're going to do that over a period of years. we need to all start thinking in maybe a different way so it's not a single mission but really is this pioneering aspect. how do we move human presence in? once you are looking at it for the long term then you invest in some things that might actually take longer to do but are more sustainable. >> last word, mike? >> i think what -- you know, well said and we're going to get there this in a sustainable, affordable way and we know the technology is important and that's why we have the investments we have underway and you will continue to see us make those investments over the next 18 months in a number of key areas. >> gentlemen, great talk. thanks for your attention. national captioning institute] cable satellite corp. 2014]
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>> hamdi ulukaya came as a guest of a guest at dinner at my house and lo and behold i had chobani yogurt in my refrigerator. he is the most interesting person, who has revitalized a whole section of new york with his wonderful product. he will be interviewed by steve clemons, who one of these days you're going to open your closet and there's going to be steve clemons, the ubiquitous steve clemons. > thank you very much. don't be shy for those of you standing in the back.

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