It takes one back to a time when this man and his fellow astronauts were cherished by the American people as patriots and lauded by politicians as heroes. They operated on the theme, “Failure is not an option” (as you may remember from the movie Apollo 13). Back in the Apollo days, NASA was a non-political, can-do agency.
But on March 28th in a letter written and signed by forty-nine prominent Apollo era Astronauts, Engineers, and Scientists (including two men who walked on the moon); these men expressed their view that NASA has become a politicized agency and have signed a letter to protest NASA’s involvement in the global warming controversy.
Recently NASA’s Administrator, Major General Charles Bolden came out politically siding with the President on the issue of man-made global warming. With all respect to General Bolden, who was an astronaut himself, this seems more like a political play than anything else at a time of upcoming election.
Their letter of protest states, “The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”
A few decades back if you said NASA would back off the space program and study weather instead people would have wondered about your sanity.
Even a few years ago, I would have laughed at the idea that America would have NO orbiter fleet. The idea that the Russians would be soley responsible for transporting people and supplies into orbit would have been horrifying.
Given the fact the we have more fraud and waste in any one entitlement program than the entire NASA budget in any given year it is beyond short sighted for Bush and Obama to decimate the space program. NASA’s budget is less than 1% of the budget. When you are concerned about politics and not the job at hand your organization falls apart. “Weather” you believe in Global Warming or not this should not be NASA’s focus. If Obama does not resurrect NASA this will be one more opportunity lost!
We need to start a betting pool. How long will it be before the US creates a new agency to do space exploration because NASA has become the weather agency?