NASA leaders discuss global challenges, solutions with Mexico president, lawmakers and students

In a often tense narration often defined by a shared border, the United States sent 2 officials with a antithetic position to Mexico this week for a spot of abstraction diplomacy

MEXICO CITY -- In a often tense narration often defined by a shared border, the United States sent 2 officials with a antithetic position to Mexico this week for a spot of abstraction diplomacy.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pamela Melroy – some erstwhile astronauts --spent 2 hours chatting with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador Tuesday, took selfies with national lawmakers and a time earlier spoke to an auditorium afloat of students and module from assorted Mexican universities.

“It’s a quality happening to privation to research and to understand, truthful we spell to abstraction due to the fact that it offers a unsocial vantage constituent that allows america to look down connected the world and survey the world arsenic a planet,” Melroy said.

From that unsocial vantage constituent “not lone bash you not spot borders, we spot North America arsenic 1 continental landmass,” a indispensable position for tackling planetary problems similar clime change.

Melroy noted that earlier month, radical crossed North America gathered to ticker a star eclipse.

“We cognize that abstraction is thing that brings america each together,” she said. “Millions of radical conscionable a fewer weeks agone from Mazatlan to Maine, stood looking unneurotic up astatine the sky.”

Nelson said successful his lengthy assemblage with López Obrador, the president was particularly funny successful space-based communications exertion similar the thousands of Starlink satellites that are bringing high-speed net to the astir distant corners of the planet.

“The president’s imagination is that radical would person connectivity that a batch of the colonisation successful Mexico does not have,” Nelson said.

Nelson said helium besides made different connection during his meetings successful Mexico: “I suggested they ought to person a Mexican astronaut.” Nelson mentioned that Rodolfo Neri, Mexico’s archetypal astronaut, had flown successful 1985, the twelvemonth earlier Nelson did.