Human spaceflight will remain an integral part of NASA, the agency's top administrator promised Friday (AP Photo)
Human spaceflight and deep-space exploration will be the hallmarks of NASA’s future, the top administrator for the agency pledged Friday, saying America’s dominance in space will continue despite the end of the shuttle program next week.
A group of former astronauts and other critics have blasted the agency and the Obama administration for ending the 30-year-old shuttle program, once the cornerstone of NASA. But NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told a National Press Club luncheon that the agency is merely starting a new chapter of space exploration _ not abandoning human space flight.
“American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we’ve laid the foundation for success,” said Bolden, a retired astronaut. “When I hear people say … the final shuttle flight marks the end of U.S. human space flight, you all must be living on another planet.”
The new goals for the agency, he said, include putting a man on Mars, deploying a vehicle to an asteroid, returning to the moon and venturing farther into deep space.
“Do we want to keep repeating ourselves or do we want to look at the big horizon and keep challenging ourselves?” Bolden asked.
The two-time mission commander said near-space missions will be better handled by the private sector while the agency he said “defined” America focuses on innovations that would allow humans to permanently live and work in space.
The International Space Station will be essential to cutting the tethers that hold humans to Earth, Bolden said. The six astronauts living on the ISS partake in 100 experiments at any given time, he added.
Bolden grew teary-eyed and liberally paused when his speech turned to those astronauts who lost their lives on the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, including his own mentor, Ronald McNair. Bolden said future space exploration will be safer because of the lessons learned from those tragedies.