Dan McCleese, the chief scientist of the Mars program at JPL, and Edward Weiler, Associate Administrator at NASA, were also on Charlie Rose last night, discussing the latest mars landing.

In the past few days NASA has had 2 billion hits on its website. Weiler had an interesting comment:

Question: To those who say, "Why do we go to Mars?" you say what?

Answer: We go to Mars not just for the science. That's for sure. That's the way we sell the program to the American people and the Congress, but it's more than just the science. I think these rovers are going to prove to be extremely exciting to America's kids, especially school kids.

In the last couple days we've had over two billion hits on the internet on the NASA webpage. That is more in a couple days than NASA got on its webpage the entire year of 2003. And I'll bet you most of those 2 billion hits came from kids.

We talked about the Apollo Program a little bit. I wouldn't be sitting here in this chair today if it weren't for the early manned spaceflight program. I was inspired by watching thos astronauts go up into space when I was a kid--to become an astronomer. I even set a goal to be able to work for NASA some day.

A whole generation was inspired by the early space program. We need to get more kids thinking about being engineers and scientists for our ecomic and other type futures, and I think that this rover program is one way to do it, because I would like not just to see all the science done, I want to see the science that we promised completed in about three months. There is some thought that the rovers might last longer than three months. Once we complete that science program. O ne of the mosts exciting things for me when I saw the first image was this is a flat terrain with very few boulders, very few obstacles. I would like to put the pedal to the metal, so to speak, and let the rovers do some real exploration.

I'm down with that.