NASA's Bolden Speaks On Future Mars Mission, Chinese Moon Landing

MarkWhittington writes "During an interview with USA Today on the eve of the arrival of the Mars Rover Curiosity, NASA administrator Charles Bolden had some interesting thoughts on why a humans-to-Mars mission should be international and not American-led, how the world should react positively to the Chinese beating America back to the moon, and what he would do (or rather not do) if NASA were to have an 'unlimited' budget."

Comments

Re:Living up to NASA's primary mission...

[epyT-R]

unfortunately, you're right..
http://www.space.com/8725-nasa-chief-bolden-muslim-remark-al-jazeera-stir.html

stuff like this is where the right wing gets the whole 'democrats hate america' thing from. this guy should be working towards america becoming 'the' space authority in the world, not by force, necessarily, but by technology and drive.

Re:On the eve...?

[khallow]

It's fluffy language where "eve" has been stretched a bit to indicate that the landing is imminent, not that it is tomorrow.

Encouraging noises from NASA

[EdgePenguin]

Its nice to see NASA talking about international cooperation. Perhaps this will make ESA, and certain ESA member states who are notoriously tight fisted with contributions and refuse to participate in any manned flight *coughUKcough*, start to think seriously about how Europe can be involved. I know people who work for ESA and for EADS, and there is no shortage of will in the industry to start pushing out properly.

As far as I'm concerned, any non-international deep space exploration runs the risk of leading to conflict between nations in space, and that is a really dumb idea. We've seen, from ASAT tests and accidental collisions, what even a handful of destroyed satellites can do to the space debris situation. A full-on space war means we lose access to LEO entirely, for a very long time.

Original interview link

[FleaPlus]

For anybody who wants to read the actual interview article with Bolden instead of just relying on MarkWhittington's distorted Yahoo summary, you can find the interview here:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012-08-01/NASA-mars-rover/56656270/1

Re:Living up to NASA's primary mission...

[timeOday]

Perhaps more to the point, the Obama administration immediately corrected Bolden and a NASA spokesman confirmed that Bolden had misspoke:

"NASA's core mission remains one of space exploration, science and aeronautics," Michael Cabbage told SPACE.com. "Administrator Bolden regrets that a statement he made during a recent interview mischaracterized that core mission."

Anybody who still recites this incident as actual policy rather than a gaffe induced by peer pressure, which was immediately retracted, is just trolling. Furthermore I defy you to identify any actual funds that Nasa has spent on Muslim outreach instead of space exploration in the two years since Bolden said that.

PS I am really looking forward to the most ambitious Mars landing yet, this Sunday.

Re:React positively?

[CrimsonAvenger]

You could eliminate the non-defense discretionary budget 100% (elimiate every non-defense segment of the government) and we'd still be running a deficit.

And if you eliminated the defense budget 100%, we'd still be running a deficit.

In fact, our deficit would still be in the top five of all time....