Missin' Statement

Oh, I was sure this was going to be about Hansen "missin'" from the Congressional hearings. Who's muzzling him how? He had a chance to speak before a Congressional committee and he refused. And Gore and Mann, too.

Nice dodge, nags. Care to comment on the topic of this post?

Nope.

A bureaucracy changes it's motto. Sorry, but it's not blogworthy.

RIght. An agency of our govt changes its mission and it's not worthy of any comment, even if a gadfly in that agency had just used it explicitly to explain his unpopular statments.

Besides, how could the mission of a 16 billion dollar a year federal agency possibly matter as much as, say, the statistical technique used by some paleoclimatolgist 7 years ago?

But wouldn't you love to have heard the phone calls that led to this little "reform" of NASA's mission? I won't even ask for the emails and memos because I can't imagine they would want to have a paper trail on this issue.

If there's one comment I love seeing it's "Sorry, but it's not blogworthy". It's the last refuge of the desperate troll.

Not just the change itself but the manner in which the change was enacted was disturbing. It pretty much confirms what we all knew ever since the Glorious Leader decided to send people to Mars. (sidenote: I must have missed a change in the meaning of 'conservative', when did we all agree on a new definition and where do I find it?).

As for the importance of the change. NASA run the largest earth science research program in the world and core mission statement no longer refers to it. It's mildly horrifying really, but people at NASA HQ and in the Administration actually think crap like "mission statements" actually mean something and these people have significant input on budget allocations.

I expect that most people will correctly interpret this as the first public signal that the administration is serious about getting rid of NASA earth science.

Don't worry everyone, the chocolate ration will be going up at the end of the week!

Like the Iraq War, the Repuke misadministration seems to be more in favor of lofty, unattainable goals, than in simpler goals that may actually save & improve lives.

This is a very big change indeed. Federal agencies are run by Strategic Plan. Internal funding applications and grants have to be written to show how the word will support the strategic plan. Since everyone missed the change (and I am inside enough that I would have heard about it if the change were widely publicized within the agency) an entire granting cycle is full of stuff which does not meet the new strategic goals

so when NASA does an "audit" they'll find to their horrors that many in NASA are doing "unrelated" work such as Earth's climate change, meteorology, atmospheric science, etc.

Time to add things up. NASA, a $16 billion federal agency, changes its entire mission statement without publicizing it, even internally. In 2001, US VP Cheney creates the administration's total energy strategy in secrecy. Federal science data is censored by a 24 year old political appointee who had lied on his resume.

And now US Rep. Barton, Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, launches an federal investigation, not into any of these items, but into one eight year old paper of one paleoclimatologist because he didn't make his data available soon enough or write clearly enough.

This is stupefyingly awful.

NASA's goal is to find out how people can live longterm in space.

Understanding how people have been able to live longterm is required.

Understanding how human civilization developed during the previous 10,000 years of unusually stable climate is required.

Understanding is required.

Once understanding is attained, Mars and Venus can be terraformed.

Please increase the budget for NASA's climate research, to further our ability to develop livable conditions and maintain them.

NASA's main goal now appears to be to get a few humans the hell out of here before the place becomes uninhabitable.

Funny story Hank, but it turns out some parts of NASA have been doing that for a while now (the writing has been on the wall for some time). At at least one NASA center there was a 'contract specialist' on staff to advise earth scientists how to modify proposals to have them meet Mars program goals. Of course, this was before the current NASA head told everyone that they definitely were not closing down Earth Science at NASA. Haha.

With this and the unfolding of the NPOESS train-wreck I'd say the plan must be for a combination of total managerial incompetence and out-right hostility to diminish US Earth Science for the next 10 years or so.

It'somewhat ironic that some of NASA's best scientists are now in the very area that NASA is apparently now de-emphasizing --earth science.

If NASA is not careful, they may lose their top earth scientists and engineers, just as they lost many of their top people in the area of unmanned space exploration when they decided to dump all their money into the the space shuttle program.

It is no accident that some of NASA's greatest engineering blunders (not just the space shuttle disaters, but the failed unmanned missions as well) occurred during this period.

If NASA was looking for the maximum scientific bang for the buck (which they are not), they would concentrate on earth and unmanned space exploration, but they are instead now focusing on the thing with the highest PR value: manned mission to Mars.

To those who would argue "look what a great thing the mission to the moon was" I would simply say that much of the work that made the moon mission possible was actually unmanned exploration and unmanned missions were continued to a great extent even while the Apollo project was in full swing.

But the cost difference between putting a man on the moon and on Mars is likley to be huge, so I would suspect that if NASA goes full bore ahead with the Mars mission, every other program is is likely to suffer. The mars mission will likley act as a giant vaccuum to suck up all the dollars.