Cyde Weys Musings

Due to the cost of the expected manned Moon and Mars missions, NASA is being forced to cut Earh-observing satellite missions. It’s so bad that, in just three years time, 40% of the current Earth-observing missions will expire and not be replaced. So maybe eventually we’ll make it to the Moon or Mars, but in the meantime, we’ll be a lot more blind about what’s actually happening on our own planet. This doesn’t sound too smart to me.

This can be traced to a combination of Bush’s emphasis on manned space exploration and lack of willingness to increase NASA’s budget. Bush really wants us to put a base on the Moon and visit Mars in person, but of course, these endeavors are very expensive. As a result, NASA is being forced to cut a large number of other science missions to come up with the necessary funds. We’re losing all sorts of missions: probes to other moons in the solar system, missions to Venus, and of course, lots of Earth-observing missions. It’s hard to really get across how absolutely necessary these Earth-observing missions are, but think of it this way: the ice sheets on Greenland are already starting to melt, crack, and break into the ocean. Knowing everything that is going on in regards to climate is absolutely essential; unfortunately, without the appropriate satellites, the data we need are impossible to get. One wonders if there isn’t a malicious motive involved in all of this: after all, if global warming is an inconvenient truth, why fund the missions to find out more about it anyway?

The real solution isn’t to cut some NASA missions to fund other ones, it’s to get the money from elsewhere. For instance, a certain occupation right now is costing us enough money to fully fund a dozen new Earth-observing missions per week. Don’t get me wrong, expanding beyond just the Earth is vital for the future survival of our species, and manned missions to the Moon and Mars are certainly part of that. But that is still a long time in the future, and in the meantime, we need to know everything we can about the Earth in order to survive in the short term.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 10:53 and is filed under Politics, Science. Keywords: Tags: Bush, climate, Earth, George W. Bush, global warming, NASA, satellites, space exploration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.