NASA’s new top priority: Help Muslim nations ‘feel good’ about themselves
Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that President Obama ordered him to make it his “foremost” mission to improve relations with the Muslim world.
Forget going to the moon, or Mars. Forget advancing technology, or inspiring the world—make nasa a public relations organization. What is this government thinking?
“When I became the nasa administrator—or before I became the nasa administrator—he charged me with three things,” recounted Bolden. “One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; 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 dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering” (emphasis mine).
Speaking to an audience in Cairo, marking the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s Cairo speech, Bolden said that space travel must be an international collaboration of which Muslim nations had to be a part.
According to Bolden, the United States is “not going to travel beyond low-Earth orbit on its own” and that no country would be able to make it to Mars without international help.
Low-Earth orbit is the area between 160 to 2,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The distance to the moon is over 380,000 kilometers.
Earlier this year, the federal government canceled nasa’s Constellation program, which was building new rockets and spaceships capable of returning astronauts to the moon.
America first landed men on the moon in 1969. Forty-one years later, not only does America not have any plans to return to the moon, but would be unable to do so without international help—so says the head of America’s space non-exploration agency.
To read about the true importance and awe-inspiring significance of America’s space program, read: “Lift Up Your Eyes!” and “Magnificent Desolation.”
