Mark Kelly

Hey, we're the only people that successfully land stuff on Mars, right?

The Russians have tried a lot of times, and they always crash.

And we're good at this stuff.

The Chinese are sort of competition with us now on a lot of different levels, a lot of technology, a lot of innovation.

In some military technology, they've gotten a little bit ahead of us.

My goal here on the Armed Services Committee in the United States Senate is to get us to catch up.

So why is this important?

So if we're going to be explorers, which is just in our DNA,

It's in our nature to do that as humans.

We always want to see what's across the ocean, what's over the next hill, what's on the next planet.

We're going to go out there and explore.

And if we're going to explore Mars someday and the rest of this solar system, we got to make a more permanent step off of this planet.

So it's important we do that.

And we get something out of it.

You know, people sometimes say to me, why do we spend all this money in space?

Well, first of all, NASA's budget is pretty small.

It's less than 1% of the federal budget.

But the money isn't spent in space.

It's spent, you know, here on the ground.

Good paying jobs.