Politics Is Poisoning NASA's Ability To Do Science

An anonymous reader writes: Phil Plait just published an article about how politics is interfering with NASA's ability to perform vital scientific experiments. As expected when we heard that Ted Cruz would be made head of the committee in charge of NASA's funding, the Texas senator is pushing hard for NASA to stop studying Earth itself. Plait writes, "Over the years, NASA has had to beg and scrape to get the relatively small amount of money it gets—less than half a percent of the national budget—and still manages to do great things with it. Cruz is worried NASA's focus needs to be more on space exploration. Fine. Then give them enough money to do everything in their charter: Explore space, send humans there, and study our planet. Whether you think climate change is real or not—and it is— telling NASA they should turn a blind eye to the environment of our own planet is insanity." He concludes, "[T]he politics of funding a government agency is tying NASA in knots and critically endangering its ability to explore."

Comments

Re:stop electing anti science politicians

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you.

I suppose someone needs to remind jackasses like you that it is not just the Republicans who are fucking things up for NASA.

Here's the chief of NASA, in an interview, saying what Obama told him to do:

"When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering,"

The "foremost" goal of NASA, according to Obama, is not science, it's literally making Muslims "feel good". Not "a" goal... not "one of the goals"....THE FOREMOST FUCKING GOAL!

http://politics.slashdot.org/s...

So please do shut the fuck up about it being "red states" or "anti-intillectuals" fucking things up. There's plenty of blame to go around without just being a partisan dick about it.