Ellen Stofan
Ellen Stofan
Ellen Renee Stofanis the Chief Scientist of NASA and serves as principal advisor to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the agency’s science programs, planning and investments. Previously, she served as vice president of Proxemy Research in Laytonsville, Maryland, and as an honorary professor in the Earth sciences department at the University College London...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth24 February 1961
CountryUnited States of America
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As a card-carrying space nerd and NASA's chief scientist, I love space movies, from 'Star Trek' to 'Star Wars' to my all-time favorite - 'The Dish', an Australian comedy that celebrates that first moment when Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of our moon.
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You see countries like India really investing in their space program because they see it as inspirational and good for their economy.
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We're not going to get humans to Mars until at least the mid-2030s, and the world is going to change by then.
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We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.
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We like to talk about pioneering Mars rather than just exploring Mars, because once we get to Mars, we will set up some sort of permanent presence.
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To unambiguously settle the questions of whether there was life on Mars, it will take scientists down on the surface.
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There's a huge question of whether you really need water for life.
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The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.
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My key aim is to get man on the surface of Mars by the mid-2030s.
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I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life.
I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.
'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.
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We actually look to the scientific community to kind of come back to NASA and tell us what the priorities should be. And then at NASA, we try to look within our budget and say, 'What can we accommodate, and what are the most important things for the nation?'
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If you think of the Apollo capsule coming into Earth with a parachute, the Mars atmosphere is just so thin, you've got to find some way of slowing yourself down really rapidly.