In my daily issue of the On-line New York Times yesterday, I read an article about how the Bush administration has changed the mission statement of NASA.

The first line, “To understand and protect our home planet,” has been deleted.

I always thought it was interesting to hear people say stuff like “I don’t know why we have to spend so much money on NASA…we should solve problems here on earth first.

Well, line one of NASA’s mission WAS to try to solve problems here on earth…but you can kiss that good-bye now.

I often started out arguments with these people by pointing out that, as government spending goes, NASA is actually quite cheap, (less than one percent of the Federal Budget - .7 percent to be exact) and would be even cheaper if they were able to actually have stable funding and didn’t have to spend so many resources doing the intricate dance of the political football.

We rarely get beyond that stage, though, because the anti-sciencer will then point out that despite it’s small PERCENTAGE, it actually does add up to multiple billions of dollars, and that there are problems down here on planet earth that the money could be spent on.

I’m not usually sure what problems they are talking about, because they are often the same people who think that welfare, education, resource conservation and public health programs are vast, useless money sinks that should be done away with as well.

As far as I can tell, they seem to think that the best possible use for the money would be in the form of tax cuts that would put more money in their pockets so that they can pay the rent for their dead-beat brother and his family and buy them food, pay exorbitant tuition for a private school, and buy a house in a gated community that has a private security force to keep the hordes of plague victims away.

I’m still not sure how they plan to use what little cash they might have left over to provide themselves and their family with clean air and water, but I suspect that it involved EVA suits bought at a surplus store.  The surplus stores would have affordable EVA suits if NASA were dismantled, I imagine.

But I digress.  And I’m being sarcastic about it.

Back to NASA.  One of the reasons that people think that NASA is a huge waste of money, is that they think that private industry could do NASA science so much more efficiently and profitably.

It’s a point I disagree with, but one I don’t care to argue, because it’s not THE point.  The point is, we see in this running debacle with NASA and the Bush administration, that it is in the interests of private industry that the work of NASA not get done.  They don’t want us to learn about and understand our world, our climate, our atmosphere, our global condition.

Some people might recall a little bru-ha-ha with George Deutsch, where he prevented a climate scientist from talking about global warming.

In fact, the new focus on exploration, (expeditions to Mars, and the moon), have taken a huge toll on the earth science portion of NASA’s mission.

My opinion is that the best explanation for this is that the administration is beholden to corporate interests that don’t want to understand and protect the home planet because it would cause them to make smaller profits.  Combine that with the influence of anti-science religious fanatics and the large voting block they command (and I DO mean command), and it is plain that understanding and protecting the home planet is not firm political ground to walk right now.

So we’ll go for the shock-and-awe of space exploration.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a BIG fan of space exploration.  The first time I actually felt so jealous of someone it tied my stomach into knots was when someone bought my brother a model of the Space Shuttle.  (I got a musical jewelry box with a ballerina that danced when you opened the lid – gag.)

Anyway, the Hubble, the Mars probes, all that stuff – I LOVE it.  No doubt.  And I see the value of it.  But.  That’s not all of what NASA is all about.  NASA is about learning how planets work, how space works, how the universe works, and no small part of that is learning how our planet works, and how we can live on it and with it.

It always puzzles me when people try to draw arbitrary boundaries around things and lose sight of the relationships between them.  After all, our Earth is IN space.  Our Earth is the one planet we have the luxury of exploring and studying thoroughly.  It is also important to study other planets, as it can lead to greater understanding of our own.  It shouldn’t be (it can’t be) a one-or-the-other proposition.

More to the point, it wouldn’t be a one-or-the-other proposition if it weren’t for political pressure from private industry and religious fanatics to hinder and subvert scientific work to serve unrestrained profits and rampant ideology.