Nice! We have Billions to blow the crap out of our fellow man and nothing for the potential salvation of the race.

Seth Borenstein at Huffington

The cost to find at least 90 percent of the 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets by 2020 would be about $1 billion, according to a report NASA will release later this week. The report was previewed Monday at a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington.

Congress in 2005 asked NASA to come up with a plan to track most killer asteroids and propose how to deflect the potentially catastrophic ones.

"We know what to do, we just don't have the money," said Simon "Pete" Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center.

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Remembering Challenger

Sunday January 28th was the 21st aniversary of the Challenger disaster.
How many of us watched our dreams of space take a horrible new direction on that day?
Danny Miller at Huffington

When the space shuttle program began in the early 1980s, it seemed to reinvigorate the passion we all had for manned spaceflight. But this new era was no longer dependent on the pioneering astronauts of my youth. Who knew? Maybe one day soon regular people like me would be able to travel in space.

[...]

I can't remember a news event that affected me so viscerally before or since. I couldn't even imagine the grief that the families and friends of the astronauts experienced as they watched the live broadcast of their loved ones' completely unexpected and terribly violent deaths. Christa McAuliffe felt like a friend, a colleague, and I still had the image of her trusting, excited husband and young children in my head. That night, in a national address, Ronald Reagan expertly delivered the famous words that speechwriter Peggy Noonan had borrowed from a World War II-era sonnet. Despite my huge misgivings about Reagan's policies and political views, I believed his sincerity and emotion when he said:

"We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

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Earth monitoring satellites about to be kaput,

Thomas Leavitt at Seeing The Forrest

Apparently, Bush and the Republican Congress have allowed the nation's earth monitoring satellite infrastructure to degrade to an alarming degree, such that one critical tool used to forcast hurricanes and the El Nino phenomenon "could become inoperable at any time", and that without action, pretty much the entire system could vanish from the sky by the end of the next decade, according to a report issued by the National Research Council on Monday...

Why would the folks governing our society be so irresponsible? Perhaps because the data produced are politically inconvenient... you'll recall that earlier this year, NASA eliminated the promise "to understand and protect our home planet" from its mission statement. Prominent NASA scientist and global warming expert James Hansen stated to the New York Times that ""They're [the Bush Administration] making it clear that they ... prefer that NASA work on something that's not causing them a problem."

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