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

Climate change is politics

[Anonymous Coward]

If I am to read this submission right — and I think I did — NASA was told to ignore a current political issue and to do their jobs while the dust settles on that.

Meanwhile OP wants to tell us the glorious truth!

Re: Climate change is politics

[DigiShaman]

It's FUD so the 1%-ers can pay penance in the form of carbon credits while in reality making the rest of us having to cut back on our resource usage. Here's a clue; the rich will only consume more off the backs of others!

Re:Yet another Ted Cruz bashing article !

[Anonymous Coward]

It's relevant because while not all Republicans are anti-science, nearly all anti-science people are Republicans. If you take a survey of people who believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, I'll bet more than 80% voted for Romney in 2012.

Re:wait what?

[pipingguy]

'Climate Change' is the all-encompassing fashionable (I Fucking Love Science!) term that brings the magic government money - unless you question the orthodoxy, of course.

Politics? I thought their main purposes were

[kenh]

A few days ago, in Cairo, Bolden told Al Jazeera that when he became the NASA administrator, President Obama charged him with three things: "One, 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 engineering â" science, math and engineering."

Source

It's a shame that politics is interfering with NASA's primary objectives from President Obama...

Re:wait what?

[Jane Q. Public]

For not being a Science Agency, they sure do employ a lot of Scientists to justify their regulations.

... and then refuse to tell us who they are or what the science is.

Re:wait what?

[l810c]

I have 2 friends and a relative at 3 different universities that hold higher positions within different science departments.

Each of them said these 3 things to me.

1) Don't use my name or Ever tell anyone I told you this.
2) It's a bunch of political bullshit. It *may* be true that we are warming the planet. But there is absolutely ZERO funding to prove the opposite and by the way, Don't use my name or Ever tell anyone I told you this.
3) Don't use my name or Ever tell anyone I told you this.