NASA, as part of the agency’s drive to make its work relevant and applicable to challenges we face close to home, adopted a mission statement a few years ago that said, “To [tag]understand[/tag] and [tag]protect[/tag] our home [tag]planet[/tag]; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only [tag]NASA[/tag] can.”
NASA took the first part of that mission seriously, until earlier this year, when the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” was [tag]deleted[/tag].
David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.
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 [tag]climate change[/tag] caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
“We refer to the mission statement in all our research proposals that go out for peer review, whenever we have strategy meetings,” said Philip B. Russell, a 25-year NASA veteran who is an atmospheric chemist at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “As civil servants, we’re paid to carry out NASA’s mission. When there was that very easy-to-understand statement that our job is to protect the planet, that made it much easier to justify this kind of work.”
The changes fits in nicely with what James [tag]Hansen[/tag], the longtime director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been saying in recent years: the Bush administration has tried to block research that examines global warming. In fact, the timing between Hansen’s concerns and NASA’s change in mission is interesting.
The shift in language echoes a shift in the agency’s budgets toward space projects and away from earth missions, a shift that began in 2004, the year Mr. Bush announced his vision of human missions to the Moon and beyond.
The “understand and protect” phrase was cited repeatedly by James E. Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA who said publicly last winter that he was being threatened by political appointees for speaking out about the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr. Hansen’s comments started a flurry of news media coverage in late January; on Feb. 3, Mr. Griffin issued a statement of “scientific openness.”
The revised mission statement was released with the agency’s proposed 2007 budget on Feb. 6.
Hmm. A noted scientist generates headlines criticizing the administration, he notes the significance of NASA’s mission statement, and just a few days later, word comes down that NASA is no longer going to focus its energies towards “understanding and protecting” our home planet.
A NASA spokesperson said the timing between Hansen and the change in the mission statement is “pure coincidence.” Given the politicization of NASA under Bush, it’s not as if the agency has earned the benefit of the doubt.