I spent two mornings this week volunteering at the Lockheed Martin Mars Experience. This is a traveling STEM outreach program that visits schools and museums across the country. The highlight of this is the virtual reality bus/Mars rover; the windows have been replaced with computer monitors and display a moving Mars landscape. It’s pretty slick.

I spoke to hundreds of kids (and did a couple TV interviews) about the Orion space capsule and future manned Mars missions. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of kids (easily 50) who said they wanted to go to Mars.