I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today.
By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface.
In my opinion, future space exploration will require us to inhabit the moon, initially, and later Mars. This is a humongous task for any one nation to carry out.
We like to talk about pioneering Mars rather than just exploring Mars, because once we get to Mars, we will set up some sort of permanent presence.
It is time to kickstart a new U.S. space transportation industry and time to spread that industry into space itself, leveraging our space station legacy to ignite imaginations and entrepreneurship so that we can move farther out, back to the Moon, out to the asteroids, and on to Mars.
I think sometime we will go to Mars and I think we'll explore it with humans sometime, but I think it's really wise to do all the robotic exploration ahead of time and learn as much as possible. Once we have learned as much as possible with the robots, then that's the time to send people, and let them then continue the research that the robots have started.
We need to begin thinking about building permanence on the Red Planet, not just have voyagers do some experiments, plant a flag and claim success. Having them go there, repeat this, in my view, is dim-witted. Why not stay there?
To unambiguously settle the questions of whether there was life on Mars, it will take scientists down on the surface.
The single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It's 38 percent of Earth's gravity - about one third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that's got reddish sand but is otherwise pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert, and that's not the case.
As we visit Mars multiple times, we will build up infrastructure on the surface to expand the capabilities and reach of humans on Mars.
China, Russia and India are shooting for the Moon. United Arab Emirates says Mars. Other private citizens and companies are heading either to Mars, asteroids, or the Moon.
I'm fully aware that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: 'Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars.
The thing that sets Mars apart is that it is the one planet that is enough like Earth that you can imagine life possibly once having taken hold there.
I'd love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology.
