The Final Frontier

By Amit Singh | Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 | Policy

My first job out of college was at NASA which actually sounded cooler than it actually was. And if the human space flight program wasn’t wasteful enough, the NASA director, Charles Bolden, was recently given a new frontier to explore. Islam.

“When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things,” NASA head Charles Bolden said in a recent interview with the Middle Eastern news network al-Jazeera. “One, 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, math, and engineering.”

Now I’m all for better relations with Muslim nations but I hardly think our space program is the place to start. Perhaps our foreign policy and economic ties to the Middle East could be addressed first? Sanctions against Iran are only strengthening the Mullahs and our lack of energy alternatives enslaves us to funding the very terrorism we spend so much more to prevent. Why is the US spending $1,000,000,000 per Al Qaeda member in Afghanistan? Finally, why would I outsource relations to roughly one-fifth of humanity to a government bureaucracy?

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