Florida Governor Ron DeSantis held a roundtable discussion with aerospace industry leaders in Merritt Island near Cape Canaveral on Thursday.
The discussion follows the morning launch of NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which will look for signs of life and take samples on Mars.
The Perseverance rover is the newest of 22 NASA missions to the red planet since the Mariner spacecraft in the 1960s.
The first flyby and images of Mars came from the Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1965. The first U.S. spacecraft to land on another planet -- Mars -- was Viking 1 in 1976. The last transmission from the Viking 1 was in November 1982.