NASA administrator says "nothing has changed" after Trump's tweet

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine says "nothing has changed" after President Trump appeared to question the space agency's plan to send humans back to the moon in a tweet last week. Speaking at NASA's Glenn Research Center, Bridenstine said the Moon was still a valuable testing ground for the ultimate goal of getting to Mars, which the president was trying to say.

"Some people have tried to read more about it," said Bridenstine at a public meeting in Glenn, Cleveland, Ohio. "But here's the problem: we're going to Mars. The moon is a waypoint. We must learn to live and work on another world. "

On Friday afternoon, Trump sowed confusion when he tweeted that "NASA should NOT talk about going to the moon" since the agency landed humans on the lunar surface 50 years ago. Instead, "they should focus on the much bigger things we do, including Mars (which the Moon is part of), Defense and Science!", According to the president.

For a few hours, the tweet has caused panic in the space world since the White House pushed NASA to send humans back to the moon in the past two years. The first-ever space policy directive signed by Trump in December 2017 invited NASA to put humans back on the surface of the moon. In May, Trump asked Congress an additional $ 1.6 billion for NASA, in addition to his annual budget request for the agency, to accelerate the project back to the moon. In response, NASA has called this lunar initiative Artemis, and the agency plans to send the first woman to the moon through the program.

The tweet seemed to indicate that NASA should not talk about those plans that the administration asked the agency to do. However, Bridenstine claimed that "nothing has changed" and that the ultimate goal of NASA is to go to Mars in the future. "So yes, we're going on Mars," said Bridenstine. "The moon is the way to get there. And we have a lot of very exciting activities on Mars right now. "

Trump's statement that the Moon "is part of Mars" is an additional source of confusion because they are separate worlds. However, Bridenstine said the president was simply saying that the moon is needed for NASA to reach the red planet one day. Many NASA officials and engineers have argued that the lunar surface is a great place to test various technologies, such as landing gear and habitats, that will be needed when people go to Mars. "If you read his tweet, he's talking about going to Mars, and he's saying parenthetically that the moon is part of that," Bridenstine said. "In other words, we are going to the moon to go to Mars."

Bridenstine also seemed to suggest that the tweet was inspired by a TV news interview. On Friday, NASA's CFO Jeff DeWit interviewed Fox Business about the agency's plan to open the International Space Station to more business opportunities – a separate initiative from NASA aimed at boosting the private space sector. The conversation finally focused on NASA's Artemis program, which may have led to the president's tweet.

"We'll just say that the information officer at the other end started arguing about why to go to the moon; we went to the moon, why go to the moon? Said Bridenstine. "And we ended up getting lost in this discussion about whether the moon was precious, which, frankly, does not correspond to what we want to be."