we could test on the ground. with that we had the greatest carbon dioxide removal system in the world. we get it on orbit, we find out that all of the dust clouds everything up. on the water system, the tubing is permeable to carbon dioxide. carbon dioxide goes into the water system and creates a nutrient rich environment for bacteria. we tested on the ground and we saw none of those problems. station can give you that chance to really dry run and test the equipment on orbit. you do not use station as an ancillary piece. you pick pieces that are absolutely necessary. some things are better for us than on the ground. you make a smart decision about what you want to go do. would you be looking to make a station or some capability like that? you would be spending considerable resources to get a platform to operate. do not forget the transportation angle. the station provides a research platform that already has propulsion. the focus on the technology and try to leverage what
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 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 cu
budgets that we spent to become great in the world. there s no reason i can see why we should not redress that grievance, although obviously it s an uphill battle. no, i don t 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% of gdp. i just don t think 1%. we may get to 1%. now 1% is 1% would be like a gold mine. indeed. and i m not saying i m just 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 have done that. we have got to get a commercial crew and we have got to demonstrate that can do it consistently. step by step, otherwise people are just not going to support us. thank you all very much. i really appreciate it. thank you. more now from the mars ex
hearing on efforts to improve education on science, technology, engineering and math. the mars exploration summit began with opening remarks from nasa administrator charles bolden, he spoke about the importance of humans becoming a multiplanet species and nasa s goal of putting humans on mars in the next two decades. this is 30 minutes. thank you very much, and thanks to all of you for allowing me to be with you this morning and it kind of kick us off, i hope. i also want to thank explore mars as well as g.w. president steve knapp and scott pace of the g.w. policy institute for bringing us together for the humans to mars summit. let s leave that slide up, i ll talk about it all day long, and at least you can refer to it and you don t have to look at me. with mars making it s closest approach to effort 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 conference, as the red planet draw
one way to look at it, apollo 13 with the event that it had. i believe that was around 84 hours. we had to keep the crew alive for 84 hours. so we had life support systems, if you re going to go to mars that have to work for months, possibly over a year, depending on how long it takes you to get there and how long you stay. we have to take the steps to get that in place. it s going to take some time to get a reliable system in place. we can land a metric ton on the surface of mars, that s all we know how to do. that s about the size of a mini cooper car. if we re going to explore mars, it needs to be something bigger than that. there are challenges that we have, we know what the challenges are, but it will take some time to get those technologies ready. have you counted up how many breakthroughs you think you need to get there? we ought to talk about it a little bit. i m not sure they re breakthroughs in a sense. if we can build on what we know now today, and just expan