Bury Your Head In The Sand

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In order to accomplish the pointless and nearly impossible space exploration goals that President Bush has been boasting about for the last couple of years, many other programs under the direction of NASA have been shelved. The Bush Administration is looking to colonize the solar system by building a permanent space station on the moon and by eventually sending men to mars. Sounds nice doesn't it? Nevermind the fact that it is now technologically impossible to send a human being to mars and back alive. It is however technologically possible to monitor and study the planet that we're living on NOW, but for some reason conservatives aren't too crazy about learning more about our Mother Earth.

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The Boston Globe
The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture -- a key factor in helping scientists understand the impact of global warming and predict droughts and floods. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, intended to observe climate factors such as solar radiation, ozone, clouds, and water vapor more comprehensively than existing satellites, also has been canceled.

``Today, when the need for information about the planet is more important than ever, this process of building understanding through increasingly powerful observations . . . is at risk of collapse," said Berrien Moore III, director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire.
Moore is cochairman of a National Research Council committee that will recommend NASA's future earth science agenda later this year. It is unclear, however, whether NASA will follow those recommendations.

``NASA has canceled, scaled back, or delayed all of the planned earth observing missions," he said.

Despite NASA's best-known role as a space agency, one of its key missions is to study the earth. Scientists collect data through ground- and space-based observatories using instruments that can sense heat and through which they can see with exquisite detail from many miles up. In recent years, these missions have increased in importance and visibility as global temperatures rise and scientists rush to better understand the phenomenon and the role of humans in it.
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Something smells a little fishy here. When scientists have been warning us for years and years of the dangers of global warming and the debate about climate change is far from over, you would think that our leaders would want to try and somehow obtain as much comprehensive information as they possibly could on the subject.

Forget about the problems we have here, we're going to put a man on mars! There's no doubt in my mind that these cuts are politically motivated and they're an obvious ploy to stall scientific research into the warming of our climate. I guess that's what you get when your country is run by a bunch of oil-tycoons and big business buddies.