When a five-year-old boy asked Dr.Geoffrey Landis if he could be his traveling companion, he picked the right man. “I want to go to Mars with you,” the Chinese boy said to Dr. Landis of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), during his lecture on Mars and Space Exploration in Beijing. The program manager with NASA arrived in China on Sept. 6 to give lectures in Beijing and Chengdu at the invitation of Science Fiction World, a Chinese science fiction journal. Dr. Landis told his audience that he believed people could realize the dream of traveling to Mars in no more than 20 years, though there are still no plans for a manned Mars mission.