Reflections on NASA at 50: Scott Parazynski

I was seven months old when John Glenn flew and I wasn't even born when Al Shephard flew, so my whole life has been tracking the evolution of NASA and then being part of it.

When I was very young, my father worked for Boeing so I had the model rockets and posters on the wall and aspirations of becoming an astronaut from those early days. I thought by the time I grew up, we'd probably be walking on Mars.

We ended up with International Space Station and before that the shuttle-Mir program, which also was very exciting. So we've learned an incredible amount by going to the moon first, then learning how to live in space for longer and longer periods of time, how to fix things on the fly. Like my last flight when we did a totally unscripted repair of a solar array in space at the very far reaches of the space station. We couldn't have done those kinds of things without an evolutionary process of learning. So I think we're really in a good posture right now to continue our exploration, to go further out, to go back to the moon.

What I'm really most excited about is going to Mars. Seeing the rovers there, doing what they've done for a couple of years now, and of course the Phoenix lander recently arrived doing what it's doing, are precursors of human exploration. I think it's amazing what our technology and our people have brought us. I think that what NASA has demonstrated over all these 50 years is an ability to take the seemingly impossible and make it possible, to make it look pretty easy a lot of times. I don't know where the next administration will take us in space. Hopefully we'll continue our course and head back to the moon as the Vision for Space Exploration has planned for us.

I doubt we would have been ready to go onto to Mars immediately after the moon, knowing what we know about the human body and adaptation to long-duration spaceflight. To send an astronaut nine months out into space to finally land on Mars, plus that radiation environment in transit, there were a lot of things that we just didn't know at that point. We wouldn't have been able to handle it. It would have been much higher risk, maybe not doable at all.

I think we're approaching the point where we could safely go to Mars. I think that when we do go, it's important to be there for the long haul, to make it like a research laboratory, not just to plant a flag, but to really study, to live there, to move off of the planet. So hopefully that's the way we'll go this time.

I think the resolve is there. I think we will accomplish what we set out to do. The reality is I don't think we'll have another JFK and another imperative like we saw back in the '60s for going to Mars. I think the only way we'll be able to do it is international collaboration, sharing the cost, and the resources and expertise.

Yeah, it may take a lot longer than we would like, longer than we're comfortable with, and of course, the more you spread these things out actually the more they cost. If you look at the space station program, if we had had the shuttles available we could have done it right on schedule, then it would have been a lot cheaper. So going to Mars is probably going to take a little longer than most of us would like and it's probably going to cost a lot more, but I think once we get there, people will be overjoyed with the results.

Scott Parazynski is a medical doctor and NASA astronaut who has flown five times in space. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of NASA or the Discovery Channel.

For more reflections on NASA's 50th anniversary, visit Discovery Space's NASA at 50 page and the When We Left Earth site's official NASA at 50 blog.

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