NASA's Mission: Exploration or Diplomacy?

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden managed to cause quite a stir on a recent trip to Cairo. In an interview with Al-Jazeera, he described the challenge he had been given by President Obama this way:

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 and engineering -- science, math and engineering.

ABC's Jake Tapper noted this week that Bolden's words were not well-received in conservative circles. Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News that Bolden's remarks were "a new height of fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there." And former NASA administrator Michael Griffin told the Washington Examiner that "it is a perversion of NASA's purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics."

It strikes me that this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot. First of all, Bolden was talking about what the president had asked him personally to focus in the course of his duties, not giving a full characterization of the agency's mission. (In other words, it sort of goes without saying that first and foremost NASA focuses on space exploration.) Second, Bolden was clearly trying to be nice to his guests. Third, as Slate's Christopher Beam points out, like it or not, NASA's mission has always been to a degree diplomatic. Why did Space Station Freedom mutate into the International Space Station? At least in part because the U.S. wanted to use NASA's auspices to build better relations with key countries.

And what's more, NASA's mission routinely has been characterized as ranging far beyond just launching rockets into space. Throughout its history, the agency's existence has been justified in terms of feel-good values that have little to do with its scientific mission. The last president certainly bought into this notion. "We choose to explore space because doing so improves our lives and lifts the national spirit," President Bush said in announcing his vision for space exploration in 2004.