Does the Mars exploration mission need a CIO?
Mars exploration is an international activity. The European and Japanese space agencies will each have an orbiter arriving there in the 2003 time frame, and the French and Italian space agencies are also interested in sending orbiters. We want to use their orbiters for relay communications, and they want to use ours. Dealing with other countries, developing standards and achieving interoperability will require someone to lead the effort, and a CIO makes a lot of sense to coordinate the effort, forge alliances and keep on top of the technology. To some extent, that’s my job. I try to lead that type of interaction with our foreign partners to make sure we achieve standardization. What can we learn from this research to help us deliver satellite-based communications such as the wireless Internet we have on Earth? There is no way you could justify what we’re doing on Mars because it’s going to lead the way for solving the problems on Earth. But this is an interesting communication problem
