Pundits weigh in on NASA's budget woes

Gregg Easterbrook, a writer for Slate.com, published an interesting rant on NASA's misguided priorities and budget entitled "It's the Earth, Stupid." Here's one of the money quotes:

"As for the moon base, for three decades NASA has sent nothing to the moon, not even a robot probe. That's because the Apollo missions found little to suggest that the moon is interesting, except to geology postdocs."

Sigh. I happen to be a geology postdoc, and furthermore I work at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, right next door to the Johnson Space Center (mission control for the Apollo missions). So an unbiased commentator I am not. But here are some nitpicking faults: NASA has actually been involved with two lunar spacecraft since the Apollo program. The first wast the 1994 Clementine orbiter (which was a DOD satellite but involved NASA scientists), and the second was the 1998 Lunar Prospector mission. To be fair, the Prospector mission billed itself as the first NASA lunar mission in 25 years. The last Apollo mission, Apollo 17, flew in 1972.

But nitpicks aside, several important points are raised in this article. More on this later.