President Donald Trump has given NASA a "great vision" about an eventual journey to land on Mars, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday, explaining that the plan would call for using the moon as a gateway before heading on for a trip to the planet.
"The president has been very clear, he wants to put an American flag on Mars," Bridenstine told Fox News' "Outnumbered Overtime." "Right now at NASA, we are putting together the architecture to do it. The president is right; we need to go to the moon first, and that's what we are working on right now."
Trump has not only talked about space travel, but has given NASA the budgets to match, Bridenstine continued.
"Right now NASA is putting together what we call the gateway, which will be an orbit around the moon...think of a small space station in orbit around the moon," he explained, adding that the plan, called the Artemis program, will mean a moon landing by 2024.
"It's absolutely true there was no plan to go to the moon in the last administration," said Bridenstine, "but President Trump, with his budget requests is fixing that ultimately so we can go back to the moon and on to Mars."
Meanwhile, Bridenstine said he thinks Trump is "absolutely correct" in saying a separate Space Force is needed, as it can compete for resources at the same level as the Air Force.
"NASA plays a role in the sense that we do technology development and of course, a lot of our technologies will be utilized by the Air Force now, but eventually by the Space Force," said Bridenstine.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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