Tdjones

Hi...thanks for joining me for my astronaut Tom Jones AMA. Crosscat: NASA has a budget of $17.7B. To do asteroids-->moon-->Mars, we'll need more annually to make that effort a reality. Taking too long to get the commercial vehicles up to replace shuttle to ISS. That's a budget shortfall, pure and simple. need political leadership.

If NASA had about $2B more per year, it could afford the SLS. ORion, and missions to asteroids, moons of Mars, and with partners, Mars' surface. Could also do a very good job of exploring the Moon with robots. Things are way too tight now at NASA , due to declining budgets of late. Write to Congress, and the president!

They should try to join existing partnerships, Karmanaut. Even a small contribution can get a science experiment aboard the ISS. Certainly smaller nations can join the effort to protect Earth from asteroid impacts, even without a space program, by contributing scientific talent or a telescope.

You're working so hard on the shuttle that it's not easy to reflect at first. But I did think -- I am half a planet away from my family, and I'm going 5 miles a second ...How am I going to get back to them. But most of the time I felt very closely connected to my Mission Control friends, and to all those familiar places I could contemplate from orbit.

No evidence for it yet, but the statistics convince me: in Milky Way, 8 billion Earth=like planets in the sweet spot around their stars...where liquid water could exist.