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

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: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....