Moon again? Been there and done that.” I was saying it facetiously.
In 2010, President Obama picked up on parts of my presentation and repeated some of my recommendations practically verbatim in his speech at the Kennedy Space Center. But not in the way that I intended.
“Why do we need to go back to the Moon?” the president asked. “As Buzz says, ‘Been there, done that.’ ”
I learned a lesson through that experience. Be careful what you say, nowadays, because it might be repeated—maybe even by the president of the United States!
JUST BECAUSE I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT motivating people to explore Mars doesn’t mean that I think we should forget about developing projects on the Moon. I know we can enjoy numerous benefits by exploring and building an outpost of some sort on the Moon. My friend Stephen Hawking, the English physicist, feels the same way. Stephen had invited me to visit on several occasions, but it simply never worked out. Then on March 14, 2015, Albert Einstein’s birthday, I was speaking at Oxford and Cambridge universities in Great Britain, and some friends offered to take Christina, my family, and me to Hawking’s home in Cambridge, where we were able to spend an afternoon together. Stephen has stated publicly, “We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue, our future is in space.” I am in complete agreement with him, so I was excited to learn more of his thoughts.
Stephen suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is wheelchair bound, and is unable to talk without the use of a specially adapted computer hooked to a speech-generating device that simulates a voice. It is difficult to have a conversation with him, however, because he has to answer by using the computer and it takes him a long time to reply. When we visited, I gave him a long monologue about my plans for the Mars Cycler. Stephen listened intently. After a while, I asked Stephen, “Well, what do you think?”
We waited a long time for Stephen’s response. Finally, he managed to say, “Why not the Moon first?”
I smiled and promised to send Stephen my book Mission to Mars and a digital version of my entire discourse on how we can successfully colonize Mars. Although I don’t want to ignore the Moon, I do want the next generation to go where no humans have previously traveled. There are entire vistas yet to be explored.
Granted, there are times when you have to change directions or try another method to achieve your goals. It takes courage to say something isn’t working, so let’s try something different. For instance, President Obama took a lot of heat when he canceled the Constellation program—a human spaceflight mission begun by NASA in 2005 but discontinued in 2010—but that was part of my recommendation. The program wasn’t working, and it never would work, so why keep pouring money into it? To me, it was not about politics. I am all in favor of support for space exploration, regardless of party affiliation. The president inherited a bad program when he came into office. Constellation had been regarded as the next big thing in space, but it wasn’t working, and NASA knew it and so did everybody else.
The problem was exacerbated, however, because President George W. Bush had already established the time line for the completion of the space shuttle program, after which the shuttles would be retired and used mainly as museum pieces. I encouraged both President Bush and President Obama to extend the shuttle program, which we could easily do by further stretching out the time between flights, and that would extend the program a little longer. Without the shuttle program, we had no readily available ability to get to the International Space Station (ISS)—which we had built but could no longer reach without reliance upon the Russians or the Chinese. When we completed the shuttle missions, we already had a deal in place with the Russians to transport our astronauts to the ISS, but at the whopping price of $55 million per American astronaut! As soon as the shuttle program ended, the Russians upped the price to $75 million per astronaut—quite a capitalistic move.
After the Constellation program was canceled, NASA toyed with another quirky idea, the Space Launch System (SLS) program, derisively called the “Senate Launch System” by critics, among whom I could be counted. I was asked to take part in a U.S. Senate subcommittee meeting in Washington, D.C., to present