— Meg Urry

(Source: CNN)

— Buzz Aldrin on the Moon during Apollo 11

— Michael D. Griffin(former administrator of NASA)

(via janf)

Here is a quote from our current NASA administrator

“When I became the NASA Administrator - he (President Obama) charged me with three things: One was that he wanted me to re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, that he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” - Charles Bolden

In all honesty I believed it to be a slip of the diplomatic tongue, but a Freudian one indicative of the corruption of thought that exist within current NASA management, and a symptom of a greater cancer that exist in the entirety of the US government. 

NASA’s priorities sure have changed in the last four years. And have changed even further when you consider all NASA used to be was a way to show American supremacy and NASA only began its wholesale embrace of international cooperation after the fall of the Soviet Union in an attempt to keep the faltering Russian aerospace industry from packing up and heading to the middle east and China.

Personally I think the current NASA policy of international-first is holding it back. The European bureaucracy takes decades to make even the smallest decisions. Half of the euro-built parts of the ISS were even US funded, so we lost US aerospace jobs, and still had to pay for everything. The Russians are lost somewhere in the late 1960s, and with all the launch failures recently I believe they might even be regressing. The only competent, large scale space program in the world right now is China’s, and the US is prevented from cooperating with them due to some cold war era technology embargo.

I have also noticed how in the last four years NASA’s future goals have become less and less optimistic. Under Griffin it was “Moon by 2020 and Mars by 2035.” From there it went to “Moon by 2030,” then to Asteroid whenever one swings close enough, then to Lagrange point whenever. 

The most humorous part about it is, this decreasing level of expectations has nothing to do with cost cuts, we would all understand that. But NASA’s budget is increasing. I am not sure where all that money is going except into the hands of big-aero and their congressional rockets, or perhaps it’s needed for all those diplomatic missions to the Muslim world.

/ rant

(via theplanetkrikkit)

I agree, Bolden just pulled a Biden when he said that. It’s too bad about Constellation getting canceled but it did have clear budgetary and tech issues that, at least according to the Augustine Commission, made it unfeasible to continue the program. John Glenn, whenever he’s asked about Obama’s plans for NASA, never fails to mention that it was President Bush who canceled the shuttle in 2004 and says he think not having an immediate follow-on (i.e. Orion) to shuttle is unfortunate but that’s the way it is. on the plus side if you look at the tremendous successes of SpaceX — which hopefully will continue with Falcon 9 launching to the ISS in a matter of days, there’s a lot of reason to be optimistic.

Regarding the minor budget increases under the Obama administration, I don’t think those were enough to make up for the initial shortfall of funding from the Bush administration.

(Source: Wikipedia)

— Michael D. Griffin

(Source: Wikipedia)

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (fortyandtwo, via asonlynasacan)

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

(Source: youtube.com)

— Michael Collins

— Gene Cernan, In the Shadow of the Moon

— President Obama

(Source: nasa.gov)