INTRODUCTION: This is AudioExplorations, a podcast series from AccessScience, the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology Online at www.accessscience.com. I'm Jessa Forte Netting. Today Dorian Devins speaks with astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for this AudioExploration: Pluto. This segment: "NASA's New Vision"

DORIAN DEVINS: How is NASA doing now?

DR. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, I mean there's a new vision in front of it, where it really didn't have one for a long time. It had vision statements but none that took it out of lower earth orbit. We haven't left lower earth orbit since 1972, that's 34 years. The new vision calls for leaving lower earth orbit, going to the Moon, Mars and beyond. And I'm genetically linked to the recipe for that vision because I served on a commission to lay out the trajectory of that vision statement. And so now in my capacity serving on the NASA advisory council, it’s like the … it serves the same kind of role as an advisory board does, it's just that they call it a council. But there are a lot of meetings related to that and how NASA spends its money, what are priorities, what's in the interest of the public, the scientific community, security, the dreams of the nation. And all these factor in in interesting ways.

MS. DEVINS: And how important is the end to most of these missions, say, I mean, the space station and the science they said they were going to do on there? I mean it seems you should, for some project like that that has a lot of cost involved, you need to have the ends mapped out somewhat, what you would like to find out.

DR. TYSON: Yeah, that's true. However, we didn’t go to the moon, the funding that enabled the voyages to the moon was not driven by — this is what we will find out when we get there – was driven because we were at war with Russia, that's what drove it. So I am politically aware enough to recognize that there drivers for all kinds of things the government does that are not necessarily inspired by scientific inquiry. And the moon missions is probably the best case in point. We can remember it as a mission that accomplished science, but that's not what drove the check writing by the United States government. So the space station had a whole list of reasons why it was built initially, to initially — well, the Russians had one, we better have one. And then peace broke out and so then it was, "Well, we've got to make sure we have something for their scientists to work on, otherwise they'll go to the enemy". So there are all these arguments, you know, and I'm not going to second guess political motives. There's a whole political machine that’s in place, and we vote for our representatives, and that's got its own agendas and its own pathways. It's my job as a scientist to make sure that whatever those pathways are that we slip some science in along the way, because otherwise it’s a lost opportunity. When Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon we gave him a corner reflector, some mirrors, to put on the Moon so you could beam a laser to the Moon and time the signal that came back. The government would not have spent a $100 billion to put a mirror on the Moon's surface. It would have never happened. So NASA wants to get back out of lower earth orbit and go to the Moon, Mars and beyond. And in there we know discoveries will be made. So that’s its priorities at this moment.

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