Yep, Pure Coincidence, That's All It Was

This morning's Progress Report points us, in the "Under the Radar" section, to the news that NASA's mission statement was quietly changed this past February. The original statement, when the agency was founded in 1958, was listed as “the expansion of human knowledge of the earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” This was changed in 1972 to “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."

It's that nasty little phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" that enabled such NASA research as that of Dr. James Hansen, a climatologist with NASA. I've written about Hansen and his work on global climate change, including the attempts to shut it down, or silence it. If you've seen the film "An Inconvenient Truth," you've also heard Al Gore talk about Hansen and his work. It was last January that Hansen occasioned a media flurry by publicly talking about threats by political appointees for speaking out about the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions. And, it was in early February, and well "under the radar" indeed, even without the knowledge and/or consent of NASA employees, that the statement of the agency's objectives was changed.

It now reads: “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.” So, the home planet is out of the running entirely, looks like. Because apparently the administration's solution to global climate change is going to be sending us all to our moon or the planet Mars. As the NASA spokesman David Steitz sees it, this mission statement change has happened "to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars." Steitz would appear to be just a little disingenuous, however, as he is also quoted in the article as saying that..."Dr. Hansen’s use of the phrase ("to understand and protect our home planet") and its subsequent disappearance from the mission statement was “pure coincidence.”

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