MEXICO CITY — In a frequently tense relationship often defined by a shared border, the United States sent two officials with a different perspective to Mexico this week for some space diplomacy.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pamela Melroy, both former astronauts, spent two hours talking with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Tuesday, took selfies with federal lawmakers and a day earlier spoke to an auditorium full of students and professors from several Mexican universities.
“It’s a human thing to want to explore and understand, which is why we go to space because it offers a unique vantage point that allows us to look down at Earth and study it as a planet,” Melroy said.
From that unique vantage point, “not only do we not see borders, but we see North America as a continental mass,” a perspective necessary to address global problems such as climate change.
Melroy noted that the previous month, people from all over North America gathered to watch a solar eclipse.
“We know that space is something that unites us all,” he said. “Just a few weeks ago, millions of people, from Mazatlán to Maine, looked at the sky together.”
Nelson said in his lengthy audience with López Obrador that the president was especially interested in space-based communications technology, such as SpaceX’s thousands of Starlink satellites that are bringing high-speed Internet to the most remote corners of the planet.
“The president’s dream is for people to have connectivity that a large part of the population in Mexico does not have,” Nelson said.
Nelson spent six days orbiting the Earth in 1986 on a space shuttle when he was a congressman.
He said he made another proposal during their meetings in Mexico: “I suggested that they have a Mexican astronaut.” Nelson mentioned that Rodolfo Neri, Mexico’s first astronaut, had flown in 1985, a year before Nelson.