"Will potential NASA budget cuts affect Johnson Space Center?"
"NASA Administrator Charles Bolden wants to help Muslims feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering," in an interview given to Al Jazeera. 
Your humble blogger predicted the former possibility last year, in previous posts here, here, and here. The Obama Administration was profligate in its spending on social programs, stimulus programs, subsidies to auto buyers, subsidies to mortgagees in over their head with their homes, and saving the jobs of state employee union workers across the nation. Yet, the NASA budget would be cut, in particular the manned spaceflight program, by several billion dollars; with the winding down of the shuttle program, this meant the loss of jobs and, equally important, spaceflight expertise, at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston.
But I couldn't have predicted the buffoonery of the second press release. It is not in the charter of NASA to make Muslim citizens, or citizens of any other nation for that matter, feel good about themselves. The mission of NASA is space exploration, science, and research. If anyone should be inspired, it should be millions of American schoolchildren, not Muslim -- children who want to become the next generation of engineers and scientists, like those of the 1960s (like me), who were inspired by the Apollo program.
In his interview with Al Jazeera, Administator Bolden said that he was exhorted by none other than President Obama to send this message to the Muslim world. Sheesh. The words buffoon, doofus, dope, clueless, addle-brained, and moron, all come to mind.
And, to top it off, we learned in February this year that NASA's new mission is global warming, and soon to be launched will be a new satellite called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, intended to provide global measurement and assessment of worldwide carbon output. Manned spaceflight is one of the most exciting and stimulating of ventures, and its funding is redirected to global warming!
Sigh. It might be too much to expect a traditional approach to NASA from this Adminstration. But, thankfully, the nation has elections every two years, and nothing would prevent manned space flight from re-emerging as a priority of a more sensible, and pro-American, Adminstration in the future.
