To understand and protect our home planet…

Now, I'm not one for mission statemtents in general, but in accordance with President Bush's wishes NASA has altered it's mission statement, which previous read: “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.”

The new statement omits the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."

But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the “understand and protect” phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

On September 12, 1962 JFK kicked off the space race with this immortal phrase "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

Not so many presidents later it seems that we deal with the hard things by deleting them from the mission statement. It's embarassing really.

Written by Mike Monteiro on July 21, 2006 |