Op-ed: NASA is not just about human space flight

[Bill McBlueState]

NASA’s Audacious Journey
By Matt Mountain and John Grunsfeld

When NASA was created in 1958, manned space travel was a daring idea that challenged the nation and the human imagination. Half a century later, critics of President Barack Obama’s proposed 2011 NASA budget make the space agency sound like a dusty old shop, ready to close its doors and abandon plans “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Casting NASA in this light is to ignore one of its most audacious, innovative and successful programs — the Space Science Enterprise.

Ever since Galileo raised his telescope to the sky 400 years ago, science has had a dual role: to challenge our perceptions of our place in the cosmos, and to challenge our technologies to push back the limits of the impossible in the pursuit of knowledge. The pursuit of space science gives NASA a purpose and a mission.

For the last 50 years, NASA spacecraft have probed the farthest reaches of the universe uncovering a sky filled with distant galaxies. Just within a single point in the sky, no bigger than you can see through a drinking straw, the Hubble Space Telescope found 10,000 galaxies. Through NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, we have seen black holes in the center of nearly every galaxy. By using observations from space, we have learned that within our own galaxy there may be a billion other planetary systems. We have even taken a picture of a planet around another star some 25 light-years from Earth.

Within a few years, the NASA Kepler mission may provide the first definitive evidence of other Earth-like planets. The 30-year-old spacecraft Voyager, traveling at 36,000 miles an hour, is about to become the first man-made object to cross into interstellar space. NASA probes have seen water geysers on a moon of Saturn, dug up water on Mars, produced 3-D images of violent solar storms blasting toward Earth, and perhaps most crucially of all revealed the fragility of our planet by sending back pictures of the gaping hole in our ozone layer and the diminishing ice sheets across our poles.

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[veganlush]

1. NASA is government-run

it should be turned over to Haliburton at once. Naked socialism isn't the answer.



























:sarcasm

[LibDemAlways]

2. Our priorities as a nation are all screwed up.

If we got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, where we have no legitimate business, we could fund NASA programs which would create jobs for many thousands of unemployed scientists and engineers, and allow them to do something positive instead of perfecting new and improved ways to kill people. The technology which has come out of the space program has been of great benefit. Unfortunately the pentagon monster must be fed. And he has a voracious appetite.

[Bill McBlueState]

3. kick n/t