Or at least speaks his mind, now that he’s retired. Houston Chronicle lets Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director, put it all out there on what the agency could be doing better:
It seems like a lot of former astronauts, and some current ones who talk to me off the record, feel the same way.
I talked to Neil Armstrong an awful lot near the end of this life. Too bad he’s gone, because he was an important spokesman for being adverse to what the political part of NASA says we’re going to do. Bolden, let’s face it, he doesn’t know what it takes to do a major project. He doesn’t have experience with that. He’s a flier, a Marine general. He’s never known what it takes to do a massive program. He keeps talking about going to Mars in the 2030s, but that’s pure, unadulterated, BS. And what have you got if you get there? Who wants to operate something that’s 40 minutes, by voice, from the Earth. Why would you want to do that? As an operator, damned if I like that. If I’m on the moon, I’ve got a 3 second turnaround. Everything I go to do on Mars I’ve got to prepare to do in an automatic mode. That’s not very smart. Pretty much everything we need to do on Mars can be done robotically. We’ve already got robots there. By the time we get the capability to send humans to Mars, it might be that robots are smarter than humans anyway. I’m serious.
We’re already seeing the impressive capabilities with robots like Curiosity.
Yeah. Exactly. If you think about the practical aspects of going into space, there’s no practical reason for going to Mars. But there is a practical reason for going to the moon. And furthermore, if you really want to go somewhere, get out of this solar system. Eventually that’s what you’re going to have to do. I don’t know how to do that, but we’ll figure out how to do it one day.
[via Mr. Havard]