The Republicans had a great Election Day in November 2014, which means that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is now the chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space. With NASA being headquartered in Houston, this ought to be an easy marriage, but Ted Cruz is a somewhat deranged ideologue.
This is already causing problems.
Senator Cruz held a hearing today where NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was invited to testify. It did not go well.
Cruz took issue with the Obama administration’s $18.6 billion budget request for NASA. He was particularly incensed that the budget called for increasing the money spent on studying the Earth and a decrease in the money spent on exploring space.
“I would suggest that almost any American would agree that the core function of NASA is to explore space,” Cruz said. “That’s what inspires little boys and little girls across this country. It’s what sets NASA apart from any agency in the country.”
Before I go on here, I’d like to note that when Senator Cruz was a student at Harvard Law, he refused to study with anyone from the “minor Ivies,” meaning anyone who did not get their undergraduate degree from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Despite this, he still begins sentences with “I would suggest…”
With that out of the way, Charles Bolden, who is a retired Marine Corps Major General and former astronaut, was compelled to explain some basics. For starters, you can’t launch rockets from the bottom of the ocean.
“We can’t go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don’t know it — and that’s understanding our environment,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Cruz on Thursday. “It is absolutely critical that we understand Earth’s environment because this is the only place we have to live.”
Yes, we also live here. That’s important. I’m glad that Bolden remembered to point that out.
“The fact that earth science [funding] has increased, I’m proud to say, has enabled us to understand our planet far better than we ever did before,” Holden added. “It’s absolutely critical.”
For example, Holden said, NASA supports studies in Cruz’s home state of Texas that measured the effects of emptying out the state’s aquifers on local land elevations.
“That’s just looking at our environment, trying to make sure that we have a better place for all of us in which to live,” he told the senator. “I think that’s critical.”
Here’s a picture NASA produced in 2011 of Texas’s depleted aquifers (red means “no water here”).
Did I mention that Ted Cruz is seriously considering making a run for the presidency?
You can actually get a fuller sense of what an asshole Ted Cruz is by reading The Daily Caller’s coverage of this hearing. Their summary explains it quite well.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told NASA Thursday to stop worrying about global warming and focus on its “core priority of exploring space.”
Politicians from Texas do not want spies in the sky looking at their lack of water or any of the other consequences of burning fossil fuels. They don’t want seismologists looking at the earthquakes caused by fracking.
Science is bad for business.