In testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology this week, NASA administrator Charles Bolden attempted to explain the interconnectedness of NASA’s priorities. Bolden also reassured committee members that Mars is NASA’s top priority and that the agency intends to get there before anyone else.

“Our ultimate focus is the journey to Mars and everything comes back to that,” Bolden told the committee according to Forbes.

In addition to Mars missions, NASA is currently planning to send a probe to Europa, move part of an asteroid into orbit around the moon to be visited by astronauts, and launch the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to the wildly successful Hubble Space Telescope which just celebrate its 25th anniversary. the space agency is also involved in a number of Earth science missions including studies of our home planets climate.

NASA has recently come under fire from Republicans in congress for devoting too much time to climate science and losing focus on its space exploration missions.

Bolden attempted to explain to the committee that studying Mars and other planets is important to understanding Earth and understanding Earth is important to the understanding of other planets.

“We need to understand Mars and what happened to it to understand what might happen to Earth,” said Bolden.

Recent studies show that Mars once had an ocean the size of the Antarctic but permanently lost most of that water to space when the planet stopped generating its own magnetic field.

Bolden also explained to the committee how many of the missions relate directly to preparations for Mars. The much criticized mission to take a piece of an asteroid and move it into orbit around the moon, for example, will provide the agency with an opportunity to test new technologies that will be critical to a manned Mars mission.

There are also plans to visit the surface of the moon again, for the first time since the end of the Apollo missions but that too will be done in preparation for a Mars mission.

As for being first to Mars, the NASA administrator was confident that organizations like Mars One and companies like Space X could not get to Mars sooner or without NASA’s cooperation.

“No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars,” said Bolden.

Space X and Mars One have both previously stated that they hope to reach Mars by the mid-20s. However, Space X is currently operating almost exclusively on NASA contracts and serious doubts have been expressed over the feasibility of Mars One’s mission, including technical and financial concerns, as well as doubts about the mission’s proposed timeline.

NASA’s next major mission to Mars will be the 2020 rover. The new explorer robot is expected to be considerably more advanced, in a number of areas, than Curiosity and the data returned will be critical for planning manned missions.

Information on NASA’s current budget proposals, as well as budget documents from past years are available at nasa.gov/news/budget.