"Our ultimate focus is the journey to Mars and everything comes back to that," Bolden told lawmakers at a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Thursday morning.
The space agency head referenced the goal of sending astronauts to Mars in the 2030s several times during the hearing as he responded to a barrage of questions about NASA's wide-ranging missions that cover everything from gathering climate data here on Earth to launching the next generation James Webb Space Telescope, sending a probe to Europa and moving part of an asteroid into orbit around the moon for study.
"We need to understand Mars and what happened to it to understand what might happen to Earth," Bolden said, referring to scientists' understanding that perhaps Mars once harbored a large water ocean in the past and may have even been habitable, but at some point the red planet stopped generating its own magnetic field, causing its atmosphere and much of its water to be lost to space.
Bolden told Representatives that much of NASA's work leading up to now has been about developing the capabilities that will be needed for a human round-trip voyage to Mars, including the recently announced mission to pluck a piece of an asteroid and move it into a lunar orbit where it will be visited by astronauts in the next decade.
"ARM (the Asteroid Redirect Mission) is how we get there (to Mars)," he said.
NASA has said that ARM will serve as a testing ground for certain technologies that will be integral to a manned Mars mission.
Bolden also said that astronauts would re-visit the surface of the moon, but that it would be done on the way to Mars.
The administrator did not take kindly to a suggestion by one committee member that the agency could be entering a new space race to get to Mars with commercial operations like SpaceX, which has said it would like to put a human on Mars as soon as the mid-2020s.
"No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars," he responded bluntly.
Bolden also wasn't shy about offering up some rather grandiose, long-term rationales for prioritizing Mars as a destination, mentioning more than once what he sees as humanity's need to "get away from being Earth-reliant" and become "Earth-independent."
"Mars is the planet that is most like earth," Bolden added, explaining how earlier conditions there may have once sustained life long ago, and perhaps still today in some form. "And it will sustain life when humans get there in the 2030s."
