Science Phile’s Priorites for NASA
NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet - New York Times
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.”
This is embarrassing. I’m astonished and depressed that the administrator of NASA would sign off on this.
I have a completely different view of what our space priorities should be.
- Either
a) assure that space is demilitarized by arms control negotiations or
b) assure military control of space.That is because doing neither a) nor b) would result in a high-probability, high-impact bad event: some other nation using space to secure military supremacy.
- Protect the earth from asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, galactic “weather,” and so on.
These are low-probability, high impact bad events that could easily result in the extinction of the species. The “outside the solar system” issues require an investment in astronomy and astrophysics with a focus on our own nearby galactic environment.
- Understand the earth. There are many high probability, medium impact events occurring on earth every day that can best be observed from space.
- Planetary exploration.
The planets are beautiful, fascinating, and nearby, but they don’t pose any immediate threat and they aren’t going anywhere. They can wait.
- Manned space for the sake of manned space.
Manned space activities should be driven by the science priorities above, not the other way around.
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