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Saturday, July 22, 2006
More presidential fucking with science
From the NYT:
The first criticism of this is pretty obvious: W wants to direct research away from things that might indicated that the Earth's environment is being damaged, most likely by his friends and the industries that keep Republicans in office. Saying that is simply putting into practice the Orwell quote I posted a few weeks back: "We have now sunk to a depth where the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can.”
In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”
David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.
My less obvious criticism is about W's obsession with going back to the moon, which is actually a pretty stupid idea. Now I admit on the surface there is something cool about the thought and no doubt W with his ignorant fratboy mentality thinks the same thing, what with all that cheese and giant black monoliths and all. But if your goal is space exploration going back to the moon is just a waste of time money and rocket fuel. There is sometimes talk of the moon as a stopping off point on our way to Mars and beyond but this is just nonsense. The difficult and expensive part of space exploration is getting things off the Earth's surface and out of its gravity well. Granted after that you still have an awfully long ways to go to get to much of anything but the start is the killer. Imagine if before you went anywhere from your house (like work, school, downtown, or even the back yard), you first had to crawl your way out of a deep pit. That's what a trip into space is and if you stop at the moon first you are just throwing yourself into a second, slightly shallower, hole. Every ounce of manmade material that is used in a space voyage must essentially first be thrown out of a 200 foot deep hole in the ground. If it lands on the moon you then have to throw it out of another 30 foot hole. The smart move is to only have to throw it out of that first hole.
When W talks about returning to the moon and then going on to Mars he demonstrates that there is yet one more area where he is completely inadequate to play the role of national leader.
