WASHINGTON, September 8. /TASS/. People should talk less about the militarization of outer space, as the use of weapons in orbit jeopardizes space exploration, Charles Bolden, former US astronaut and the head of NASA in the Obama administration (2009-2017), said in an interview with TASS.

"I think we need to talk those people down so that they don't talk so much about militarization of space," Bolden said. Commenting on Under Secretary of the US Air Force Melissa Dalton’s words that Washington was planning to deploy hundreds of satellites on the lower earth orbit, basically to counter Russia and China, Bolden admitted that "so I'm not privy to the information that she has to allow her to make that statement."

"But any thoughts of kinetic warfare in space, we all need to understand that it's going to take us out of the business of space for some time," said Bolden, who is a retired Marine Corps major general.

"Because if we do engage in warfare in space, particularly a kinetic war, the first time you blow up a satellite in space, you've taken out an orbit. It's not like shooting somebody or blowing up a tank down here on the planet, where you've got a big pile of debris over there, and you go around it. You don't do that in space. And I know everybody is conscious of that and is thinking about that," he continued.

The former NASA chief said that as a military person, he felt that his job was to "to maintain peace so that we didn't have to go to war."

"That was what I did as the NASA Administrator," Bolden explained. "I knew that if I ever had to exercise my training, if I had to exercise my war fighting skills, we had failed somewhere along the way," he concluded.