Reflections on NASA at 50: Wayne Hale

I'm excited to be part of the agency as we get ready to go back to the moon. When I came to work for this agency many years ago, I thought we were going to do the shuttle and station thing for a couple of years and then the rest of my career would be go back to the moon and on to Mars and do other things that we're going to do with human beings in space.

Even though you suppress it after a while, it is a little disappointing that we spent 30 years in low-Earth orbit without sending human beings further out. That's what inspired me as a teen-ager -- the moon landings -- that's what I think will inspire teen-agers today. Not that what we're doing on the space station and the space shuttle isn't important -- I think it is extraordinarily important -- but the exploration vision is really motivational to me.

I think if we were not to go on and explore, we would as a nation cede our pre-eminence in space to other countries. Some people have called that the potential of silence: one day we'll wake up and realize that we're not doing something that the world's superpower, that the great nations of the world need to do.

Sputnik was a wakeup call. At some point there will be a wakeup call if we don't do this. I hope we don't get to that point.

There's going to always be a fraction of the population that's going to say, "Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt." What's different? I would say what is different is that we're not just flags and footprints and not-going-back-again. This time we're going to set up an outpost. This time we've come to stay.

Even more importantly, it's part of a long-term, broader strategy. The real goal in the medium term is going to Mars. Mars is the most habitable place in the solar system apart from the Earth. The moon is always going to be an outpost. It's always going to be like Antarctica -- a place that's got to be supplied from the Earth or from some other place. But on Mars, you could really live off the land. It is place where people can permanently settle. It could be a new colony in another 100 years or something. It is a place where humanity can get off of being just a single-planet species. I think that's important. But even Mars is just a stepping-stone to other things.

When you talk about what's the ultimate solution to the energy crisis or the pollution problem, there are resources in the rest of the solar system that can solve all these problems if we can get there and use them. So, just as Queen Isabella's crown jewels probably did more to eradicate poverty in Europe than anyone could have imagined when she gave them to Columbus for his fleet, so space exploration will do more for our planet and the people living here than anyone can imagine today. If that doesn't inspire young people, I don't know what will. What in there is not inspiration? We just need to get that message across.

Part of the problem with all us over-50 folks -- it's a generational thing and it's nothing new, it's been around since the beginning of time -- is that folks our age communicate differently and in different ways than teen-agers and 20-somethings. We need to figure out how to communicate that better and I think they will come on their own. I think they'll get tired of watching Britney Spears every night on TV. At some point we need to be ready to show them something more exciting than tossing M&Ms back and forth in zero-gravity. That's pretty harsh because we do a lot of interesting things, but we don't present them in exciting ways.

Former shuttle program manager Wayne Hale is now blogging, Twittering and reaching out as NASA's deputy associate administrator of strategic partnerships. 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.

Got something to say? E-mail your questions, comments or concerns to discoveryspace@discovery.com. Your words may appear on Discovery Space.

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