Cheer Babes or NASA budgets

Gregg Easterbrook is truly a renaissance man.

When he's not writing the incredibly detailed and insightful pro football column on the NFL's Web site - which I dearly love as it parses the stats and such about pro football and provides a weekly dose of cheerbabes - or doing whatever senior editors at The New Republic do, or being a visiting fellow at thinktank The Brookings Institution, he's writing stuff like this analysis of the NASA budget for Slate.

He argues that the government should be focused more on science projects related to this planet or projects that have relevance to us - rather than throwing money at the space shuttle or a moon base.

"The new budget request suggests that no one in the agency's hidebound, turf-obsessed upper management wants to think about what NASA can do to actually benefit the public."

While I may be one of those with a "silly Sci Fi channel fantasy" about humans seeking out new life and new civilizations and boldly going where no one has gone before...Easterbrook makes a lot of sense.

His proposed NASA priorities focus on research about the Earth (esp. climate and rainfall changes) and sun, automated probes to study the solar system and our neighboring systems, axing the shuttle in favor of research on new propulsion systems and "a serious program for searching nearby space for asteroids and comets that might strike Earth and figuring out how to deflect any big rock headed this way."

Methinks someone has seen Armageddon on TNT a few too many times. :)

It's the Earth, Stupid [Slate]