NASA's New Mission to the Dark Side?

White House Denies Ordering 'Muslim Outreach'


Bridge detail and Moon, Washington DC.

It all started when NASA chief Charles Bolden started granting interviews to Al Jazeera, stating that the President had charged NASA with a new mission: to make make Muslims feel better about their culture and history.

"Before I became the NASA administrator, he charged me with three things," Bolden said. "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."

Now Robert Gibbs is out there denying the whole thing. Still, it sounds just like the kind of thing you would expect from this White House... and the two interviews with Al Jazeera seem so... premeditated. Michelle Malkin launched a contest to redesign the NASA logo to better represent the space agency's new mission and the entrys were really funny. I don't think you can backpedal out of this, Mr. Gibbs, it is too much in character with your boss' way of doing things.

NASA, you may recall, was begun as an 'outreach' to the former Soviet Union. After Sputnik, the United States knew that being left behind in space exploration was not an option. The Russians got the first satellite in orbit in 1957 and followed with the first man, Yuri Gagarin. Taking the high ground in space exploration was clearly in our national interest and President Kennedy laid down the famous challenge to put a man on the Moon in a decade. The rest is history. The Apollo program, accomplished not by the military, but by a civilian agency, inspired the world. It told the world that America was here and strong without rattling a single sabre.

In fact, the brilliance of NASA was that it created an invitation for the nations of the world to come together and explore space peacefully. The International Space Station is the fruit of this 'outreach.'

Now it could be suggested that Nasa should craft its 'outreach' to the star and crescent in the same way that it crafted its 'outreach' to the hammer and sickle... with a clear statement that America intends to hold the high ground.