Claiming no privileged information, this writer is enormously optimistic that incoming Trump pick to head NASA, Jared Isaacman, will terminate funding of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in concert with DOGE waste-cutting, space program redirection, and pro-drilling energy priorities.
The Wall Street Journal purports to have a clearer inside picture “based upon interviews with nearly three dozen people close to Elon Musk, the Trump administration, NASA, lawmakers and SpaceX,” one which comports with my prediction that a shifted critical path emphasis to ambitious human Mars programs will redirect vital funding away from readily expendable climate research and related green energy agendas.
According to the Journal, President Trump announced the appointment soon after Musk reached out to Isaacman, the payments entrepreneur who has flown to orbit with SpaceX and invested in the company asking if he would take the job.
All three, Trump, Musk and Isaacman, share independently wealthy billionaire backgrounds and uncommonly far-forward-looking societal goals.
During his joint Congress inauguration speech, Trump said that he would launch Americans to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
Musk said in a mid-March Fox News interview, “We are going to be able to take astronauts to Mars and ultimately build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. That is the long-term goal of the company: make life multi-planetary.”
Isaacman, the founder of Shift4, a payment-processing company that partly funded the SpaceX “Polaris Dawn” suborbital mission and flew aboard as a crew member told the Wall Street Journal in 2021 “You have to go past where we’re comfortable.”
After Trump announced his nomination to have him lead NASA on an X post, he said, “I can confidently say this second space age has only just begun.”
Dialing back to NASA GISS, it’s difficult to imagine that any of the three dedicated space exploration action figures will wish to continue to divert any more of the agency’s annual $25 billion budget to support climate alarmism by an ugly poster child for DOGE waste spending reform.
Some will recall that GISS, a small climate modeling shop located in a Manhattan office building, was originally used to give unwarranted credibility to a claimed human-caused global warming crisis from the beginning.
Former GISS Director James Hansen first gained worldwide attention in 1988 following his star witness testimony before then-Senator Al Gore's Committee on Science, Technology and Space when he stated with 99% certainty that temperatures had, in fact, increased and that there had been some greenhouse warming, although he then made no direct connection between the two.
This observation was consistent with concerns about a particularly warm summer that year in some U.S. regions.
Over time, Hansen's pronouncements became ever more dramatic.
In a Dec. 6, 2005, presentation to the American Geophysical Union he stated that the Earth's climate was already reaching a tipping point that will result in the loss of Arctic ice as we know it, with sea levels rising as much as 80 feet during this century, thus flooding coastal areas. He warned that this could be halted only if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced within the next 25 years.
Hansen was subsequently arrested three times in climate protests while holding that NASA position, yet he was never fired.
In 2011, Seven Apollo astronauts, along with two former NASA Johnson Space Center directors and several former senior management-level technical experts, lodged formal complaints to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. regarding the dismal and embarrassing state of the agency’s climate science programs.
An April 10 letter admonished the agency for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change, while neglecting basic empirical evidence that called the theory into question.
The group also charged that NASA in general, and GISS in particular, had failed to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change, and was relying too heavily upon complex climate models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions.
It specifically asked that GISS, headed by Hansen, be required to “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites.”
As Gavin Schmidt who succeeded Hansen as GISS director told the renowned journal Science in 2021, "It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this admission” that the models can’t be trusted as a policy instrument because “You end up with numbers for even the near‐term that are insanely scary — and wrong.”
So there, you have it.
If GISS candidly admits that it can’t be trusted to predict the future of climate, much less any possible basis for believing humans can change any outcomes by switching from fossil energy to windmills and electric vehicles, why should NASA allow such irrelevant nonpredictions to influence future human expeditions to Mars and beyond?
Isn’t it time to make America’s once visionary and inspirational space program great again too?
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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