'Space is the place': NASA administrator touts Artemis I as the key to our future on Mars

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My oldest daughter will be 25 in 2040. And, if all the space toys and costumes I've bought her over the years during my layovers in Houston International Airport actually work like I convinced myself they would, she might be able to travel to Mars with NASA as an astronaut.

At least that's the vision from the top. NASA is planning to get humans to the red planet by that date. The Artemis I mission of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft is a key step in that dream. 

Named after Apollo's twin sister, Artemis' journey was derailed last week. The world's most powerful rocket is headed to the moon for the first of three missions. The whole program is estimated to cost about $93 billion. 

I spent an hour talking to NASA Administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson, as his team prepared for Artemis I's launch – the next big step in a grand mission to prepare to travel to, and one day live on, Mars. 

Here's what he had to say. 

Why are we going back to the moon unmanned? 

We're going back to learn, to work, to create new technology, to live in a very hostile environment in order to send a human crew to Mars.

And then Mars is just the next step as we begin to explore this universe that is so big. Now that we've seen light from over 13 billion years ago from the James Webb Space Telescope: The formation of the first galaxy. It's hard for us to even conceive how big the universe is.

There's a lot to explore. 

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This is a test flight. We're gonna stress it and test it and it's gonna be longer than a regular mission, and the primary thing is we we've got to make sure the heat shield works. It's coming in hot and fast, it's coming in at 32 mach – that's 32 times the speed of sound, it's coming in at 5,000 degrees. This is much hotter than we've seen before, close to the temperatures on the Apollo program but a brand new design and a brand new heat shield. Gotta make sure it works before you put a human who has to endure those kinds of stresses. 

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We're doing that stress to the un-crewed rocket and spacecraft first before we put humans on it, because when you go quarter of a million miles away to the moon, you gotta be sure you know what you're doing. 

How will this help us get humans on Mars? 

It's three to four days to the moon. Not so with Mars. With our conventional propulsion it would take us months to get there. And then once you're there the planets are out of alignment for you to get back in the same amount of time so you're going to have to stay on the surface of Mars for a year or two. 

We want to sprint to Mars in two months, three months max. These are part of the technologies that we will be developing.

What are you looking to eventually do on Mars? Do you think we will establish a human outpost there? 

Our frontier is upward. It is part of our character as American people to explore, to discover. 

Now we go as an international mission. The European space agency is very much a part of this mission. It has the European service module that gives all the life support missions to the space capsule, Orion. When we put a mini space station in orbit around the moon it will have the participation of not only Europe but Japan and Canada. Fifteen nations participate right now and are part of the International Space Station. 

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What we have right now (on Mars) is a rover as big as a truck. It has a little helicopter, we just planned to see if a helicopter could, in fact, fly in a 1% atmosphere. Not only is it flying, it has become a scout for the Rover. The Rover is digging down, putting titanium tubes with cores of Mars in this dry lake bed where the river used to flow into this lake millions of years ago on Mars. 

Where there's water there's likely life. We want to see the evidence of that life, and that's one of the missions of NASA: To reach out into the heavens and determine was there life, is there life, and what's our place in it? 

When do you think there could actually be a human team on Mars? 

President Obama announced the goal and he said early 2030s. It will be the late 2030s, possibly 2040, that we will land on Mars. And they will determine what do we do from there. Do we set up a settlement? Is there another place we want to go? Do we want to make floating cities in space?

Suppose we had determined life elsewhere. There may be a quest at that point, not only to establish contact but to see what kind of contact we could have. 

Let's talk about the price tag: How do you justify it when there are Americans unable to pay rent? 

When you develop new technologies there's a real significant development cost, particularly when you're doing it for space flight. It's very unforgiving, space is hard. Space is the place, however.

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How do you justify the cost? Well, look what we learned and developed from going to the moon. Look at what everybody takes today for granted: Your location on Earth, you want to go from here to there, you turn on your GPS, you turn on your TV to get a weather report that is fairly accurate. A lot of that has come out of the development of (space) high technology programs. Now, that costs money. 

But, space is hard and space is expensive. 

What else do you want people to know about this mission? 

As we venture out and find new things and who knows, possibly new peoples, we need to do it in a peaceful way. That's why we have initiated, along with 15 other countries, the Artemis Accords, that say that we want our quest in space to be for peaceful purposes where nations of the Earth will help each other and we will do it in a cooperative way. 

Carli Pierson, a New York licensed attorney, is an opinion writer with Paste BN, and a member of the Paste BN Editorial Board. Follow her on Twitter: @CarliPiersonEsq