NASA no longer tasked to understand planet Earth

[Boyo_Jim]

According to this NY Times article, the phrase “To understand and protect our home planet” has been removed from NASA’s mission statement, with zero internal discusion or announcement to the staff.

To be fair to the NASA management, it was only put into the mission explicitly in 2002.

OTOH, according to the Times story,

In the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established the agency in 1958, the first objective of the agency was listed as “the expansion of human knowledge of the earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.”

I must agree we know all we need to know to make it to the Apocalypse and the Rapture.

[cerberus]

NASA is about aviation and spaceflight, having evolved from NACA. The science bits have always been somewhat a side issue with NASA, which is more about actually getting stuff into space. The original motivation was to just do it, then the weapons/Sputnik/strategic end drove the funding, then basic science formed the basis for continued funding.

Science applications for space science, as well as their commercial applications, sustained NASA as a rational basis for space transportation. Over time, commercial concerns (launchign satellites) has driven the growth and expansion of near-Earth spaceflight, with much of the business going to non-NASA creatures like ESA.

NASA supports pure science more as a continuation of the science missions that were wedged into the Apollo Program: presumably, spending the money just to spite the Russians, and to allow Alan Shepard to play golf on the Moon wasn’t sufficient motivation.

NASA continues the science missions, more as a matter of remote probes. While NASA serves a purpose in supporting Earth-based research, other agencies do that stuff full time.

If you want to study the seas and the oceans for themselves, that’s the job of NOAA: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA includes climatology via the Weather Service.

USGS: United States Geological Survey is about the earth science bits.

[Boyo_Jim]

I bumped this because I’ve found some support for the idea that NASA’s money is going the way of it’s mission statement, that is AWAY from earth science. According to this Washington Post article (requires registration):

…Mr. Bush’s astronautical ambitions are cutting deeply into NASA’s budget to, among other things, monitor global climate change… NASA admits that the climate-monitoring funding has steadily decreased since fiscal year 2004.

Dozens of projects are in jeopardy or have already been scrapped. NASA’s satellite network that monitors global weather patterns – including hurricane formation – is aging, and replacements may arrive late or not at all. The agency’s Hydros spacecraft mission – which would have recorded soil moisture, an essential way to gauge the severity of global warming and its effects – got the ax.

[Mangetout]

I wish someone would release me of the burden of trying to understand our home planet, or rather, it’s inhabitants. Bloody humans.

[Jurph]

Like cerberus said, it’s not that nobody is going to be spending money on earth science - just that NASA is no longer considered the right team for the job. One of NOAA’s seven principalities (I’m sure they’re called departments or key focus areas, but you get my meaning) is NESDIS: the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, and they’re still going to be making cutting-edge earth observation satellites. The problem is that NASA is famous for coming up with pie-in-the-sky satellite projects and then assigning scientists to manage the engineers. This is a recipe for disaster because scientists crave performance at the expense of cost and schedule, and engineers managed by scientists will gold-plate everything they can.

Now NOAA is not much better at it, so they’ve enlisted the Air Force’s help to learn how to buy space hardware. The Air Force is (usually) pretty good at buying satellites, but the first joint venture between NOAA and the DoD is NPOESS, and it’s bleeding cash and scientific performance pretty badly. Because NASA is helping them both to develop the first satellite of the NPOESS series, whoever gets stuck with the blame on this one (NOAA or NASA) is going to have a really hard time convincing Congress that they should be given another $8 billion to try again.

As long as the gov’t keeps accepting contract bids to put “developmental” or (shudder) “experimental” hardware on a satellite within an “operational” timeline – each of those words in quotes has a well understoof definition in the space community – it doesn’t matter who’s managing the contracts, because they’re going to be late, over budget, and flaky.

So this year, NOAA is winning the political fight. They get to buy the satellites, which means they get the billion-dollar contracts, which means that each office above the satellite offices gets a percentage of the management budget off the top for “overhead”. Now you see why NOAA wants it, and why NASA wants it back, and why the Air Force is reluctant to share it.

[934spe]

But it appears they are looking for some woodpeckers!!

From http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/04/nasa.woodpecker.reut/index.html

NASA scientists have joined the search for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought to be extinct but recently sighted in Arkansas.

NASA used a laser-equipped research aircraft to fly over the Big Woods area of the Mississippi Delta to learn more about the big woodpecker’s potential habitat, the U.S. space agency said on Thursday.

[Quartz]

I liked a recent comment about Nasa on Slashdot:

1960s: ‘We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard’ (JFK)

2006: ‘Too expensive.’