President Obama Reads TAE?

It has become clear to me in the last 24 hours that President Obama reads my blog. Sullivan noted that Obama likes reading off-beat blogs, and if you did a web search for "the abstracted engineer" this site is the first that pops up. Why else would the Obama Administration, which just as recently as last year earmarked 19 billion for NASA, do a 180 and start slashing NASA programs that TAE has time and time again ranted about.
It was late last year that I went on my most recent diatribe about NASA, and their $2.3 billion folly of the decade, the Mars Science Laboratory. Earlier last year, I argued that NASA has become no more than an economic stimulus vehicle, more on this later. Here, I explained that reexamining meteorites that may or may not have come from Mars is interesting, but an epic waste of tax dollars. And that was just December!
Back in November, NASA announced (based on a single data point) that the Moon was a significant source of water, which I pointed out was actually announced by India in September.
Back in October, when the "NASA report" came out, I identified several problems, including the fact that NASA's abusive disregard for fiscal restraint, their inability to set realistic goals, and the fact that the report was coauthored by no one directly opposed to continuing human spaceflight. The most fun I had in October was dissecting Fred Guterl and Eve Conant argument for space privatization...and pointing out that North Dakota's GDP is not significantly higher than NASA's annual budget!
Also in October I wrote a defense of NASA, against myself really, and pointed out that their mission statement is brilliant...if only they actually followed it!
September: It's Time To Replace NASA
August: 600 million dollar flood toilet.

You get the picture. The point is, my day is very bright, knowing that President Obama, with whom I do not always agree, is making smart choices. See, I'd love for NASA to have a huge, massive budget. But not NASA as it exists today, a lobbyist-controlled, bureaucratic bog of tax waste and fiscal irresponsibility. Pulling the plug on very expensive, pointless missions like a repeat Moonshot is fiscal conservatism, dare I say it. If Obama sticks with this, and gets his budget passed without ballooning the NASA allocation, I will laud his efforts.

But President Obama's brilliance may be two-fold; he plans to refocus NASA on atmospheric research. Climate change skeptics would be happy to know that publicly available, peer-reviewed, credible data was being gathered by Americans to help settle the debate. And NASA is good at collecting data, and they have the facilities already to launch, monitor, and deorbit satellites. In a way, they may be the single best organization on Earth in terms of readiness for space-based atmospheric data gathering.

Of course, Obama sending a message to Congress that they can't use NASA for their-district-pork means a fight is coming over this. Those of us with sense should stand with the President and his (still hard to say this) sound fiscal strategy.


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