What?  Sacrificing serious scientific work for splashy, glitzy political grandstanding?

Surely not in our current government?  I’m shocked.  Shocked!

After all, you would think that we would want all these highly qualified scientists to be hard at work figuring out what to do about climate change, and exploring the origins of the universe and…

…oh wait.

I forgot.  There’s “no conclusive evidence” that there is climate change, and “no conclusive evidence” that humans have anything to do with it, and the Big Bang is “just a theory”.  Why would we go looking for any more knowledge that might be inconvenient to industry or uncomfortable to fundamentalists when we can use sending men to the moon and to Mars as an excuse not to?

Yeah, I know, NASA has always been a political football.  It’s nothing new…but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still raise a stink about it.  And since this is part of an endemic problem for this administration, every instance of science being messed with deserves our attention.

Hey, the sci-fi geek in me would love to see a manned mission to Mars.  Just seeing a human being standing on another planet would do my heart and soul a world of good.  But as inspiring, awesome, and meaningful as that would be…let’s not sacrifice actual knowledge.