We are pioneering, we have established
a presence. The pioneers established a
presence on the planes and settled the
United States, we've established a
presence and we know how to live in low-Earth orbit but we want to go beyond
that and we want to explore and pioneer,
establish a presence in our solar system.
Well we have set up what we call our journey to Mars and there's three zones. There's the
Earth-dependent zone, we're there right
now with the International Space Station
and to get to Mars that
Earth-independent zone, we need to get out to this proving ground in the middle and
prove the systems that we need to
establish that trip to Mars to make it
viable with the propulsion technology
that we have today we're a mission to
Mars is anywhere from a year and a half
to two years to get there, have time on
Mars and come home. And there's a lot
that we need to learn to make that
happen. In theEarth-reliant zone, the
International Space Station is a
fantastic engineering test bid to prove
those systems that we need to become
truly Earth-independent. To get to the
International Space Station we need a
reliable way to get there. We've been
going back and forth to low-Earth orbit
for fifty years, we know how to do that. We need to focus on that
exploration part of it so we have the Commercial Crew program. Commercial cargo right now
with Orbital ATK and SpaceX with the Dragon and commercial crew with Boeing with the
CST 100 on an Atlas 5 and SpaceX on the Falcon with the crew Dragon. We also have
operations we need to conduct to prove
that we can operate away from lanet
Earth for an extended period of time
both operations and with the systems
that we need before we can go to Mars
and that's going to be critical.
How are we going to get there? We're going to get there with the Space Launch System and Orion
and the first thing that we have to do if we're going to be able to get to Mars is have
a rocket that can get us there, that's SLS. It truly is a unique vehicle
and most cost effective for what we have.
It is evolovable. This is a program you
know that is capability based. We're
going to have to have a crew vehicle
that's the MPCV Multi-purpose Crew
Vehicle Orion. So there was a flawless
test flight from start to finish, four and a
half hours,
3,600 miles away from Earth, reentering
at 85% of lunar reentry velocity, checking
out the thermal protection system, it
performed flawlessly. Seventeen different
separation, pyro events that had to happen perfectly, eleven parachute events
total to make everything work out right.
Radiation was less than we thought. Over at the Stennis Space Center they're
testing those SSME's. Those engines
will be utilized in the core stage
and the solid rocket motors were tested
in March we did the call test March 9th,
of the five segment solid rocket motor.
Same casings that we use for the shuttle
program only this time instead of four
segments we have five segments for more thrust.
Eventually we're going to need some sort
of habitability module and lander, those
will come, this program allows us to go
anywhere and I look back you know it was
December 17, 1903 when Orville
and Wilbur made that flight at Kitty Hawk
and the first powered flight travelled a
distance of about a hundred and twenty
feet that's the length of the space
shuttle and lasted about 20 seconds.
Look where we are today and I believe the next fifty years of spaceflight are going
to be even more phenomenal than those first fifty years that NASA had.
