NASA’s obsession with global warming research is crowding out funding for planetary science and exploration, according to Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
“The Obama administration has consistently tried to cut NASA’s space exploration budgets in order to fund increases for Earth science programs,” Smith wrote in an email to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Just this year, the president proposed drastically cutting NASA’s exploration systems by more than $440 million dollars while Earth Science accounts have increased by 63 percent over the last 8 years.”
“These cuts would make it impossible to keep on track NASA’s programs that will take our astronauts to the moon and Mars. Thirteen agencies do climate research, but only one conducts space exploration” continued Smith, a Republican.
The budget of NASA’s Earth Science Mission Directorate is the largest and fastest growing budget of any NASA science program. Over the same time period, the general NASA budget grew only by 10.6 percent– just enough to account for inflation. The directorate’s goal is to help NASA “meet the challenges of climate and environmental change.” The organization is also responsible for global warming models that have proven to be inaccurate.
President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress seem to consider expanding the directorate’s budget to be a political imperative. Obama has repeatedly attempted to cut other NASA directorates, such as Planetary Sciences and Exploration, so that money could be redirected to Earth Science.
Even global-warming alarmist Bill Nye the “Science Guy,” who’s also the CEO of the Planetary Society, has criticized Obama’s attempts to cut NASA’s space exploration and planetary science programs in favor of global warming. NASA’s planetary science program has previously held car washes and bake sales to gain political support to maintain funding.
A hearing on Tuesday showed how the Earth Science Mission Directorate’s involvement in data-collection from weather satellites for environmental science purposes has created jurisdictional issues and bureaucratic confusion with other agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the United States Geological Survey.
Due to these issues, much of the American meteorological satellite fleet has been permitted to age to the breaking point. In 2016, for the first time in over 50 years, the U.S. won’t have a polar orbiting weather satellite. Such a gap in coverage tcould leave the U.S. without crucial satellite data for over a year due to delays and cost overruns, and dysfunctional management, according to a report by the Government Accountability Organization.
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