When NASA is trying to land astronauts on moon by the year 2024, the chief of the agency has reminded employees that Mars is NASA’s ultimate destination. Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, said that their destination is not moon, rather a waypoint. He said this during a discussion at the Global Research Centre of NASA in Ohio.
Bridenstine defended President Donald Trump’s controversial statement on Friday. The President had tweeted that NASA shouldn’t be discussing about going to moon, we had done that around 50 years back; they should now be focusing on bigger things that we are doing like Mars.
Some people have suggested that Trump is throwing water on the plans of new moon of NASA which is reversing his space policy and confusing the moon of Earth with Mars’ moons.
Pointing towards Trump’s tweet that moon is Mars’ part, Bridenstine said that they are going to the moon for getting to the Mars. He added that anybody who interpreted the tweet literally has been reading too much into it.
Bridenstine had speculated that the tweet of Trump was induced by Fox Business’s television segment in which the discussions of NASA’s plans of landing astronauts on moon by 2024 was turned into debate of whether the moon’s human exploration is even valuable. Bridenstine said that the moon is important as it is a ground to reach Mars and that is what the President said.
He added that everybody needs to learn to work and live in other world, adding that moon’s exploration would provide NASA an opportunity of demonstrating technologies which would be required for getting humans on Mars. NASA’s proposed station of lunar space would serve as waypoint between lunar surface and the Earth. He said that it is human’s access to Mars. He added that this is the Gateway that would make us reach Mars, but for that the technology has to be proved.
