Over at Astronomy Blog, Stuart has made a list of us bloggers who reported from AAS, and along the way mentions that this is (was) Delurking Week. If you don’t know, this is the week that you should be commenting on blogs that you read, rather than leaving those commmenting boxes blank and lonely. So, comment away! I won’t mind.
Stuart also links to a great little vodcast created at the opening reception of the AAS meeting by the Slacker Astronomers. They went around the reception asking questions like “What size underwear do you wear” (to which Phil Plait answered “M”), and “What’s the center of the universe—Earth or the Sun?”
Lots of funny answers to that one, including one from Phil (again) who promptly said, “My daughter.” Of course, there is NO preferred spot in the universe, so you could say that Earth or the Sun are the center, but then again, if you were attending AAS on Alpha Centauri IV, you could say the center was there, too. At least most of the astronomers who answered knew that it was a funny question and had a good time with it.
A Questionable NASA Hire?
Normally I do not do political commentary, but occasionally a story comes across that requires a few words. What follows is one of them. I wonder what will happen to NASA now that a former second-in-command for FEMA during the Hurricane Katrina disaster has been hired as a so-called “senior advisor” to NASA administrator Michael Griffin?
In a Washington Post story, NASA spokesman David Mould said that Patrick Rhode, who started his unlikely career toward scientific policy as an advance man for the Bush-Cheney election campaign in 2000, was a good choice for the job because, “He’s done a lot of things.”
Some of those things include a well-circulated email that he sent to his boss during the Katrina disaster, telling Brown that he, too was sitting somewhere moussing his hair. (This while New Orleans drowned, homes in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, and Texas were torn apart, and thousands of people were left homeless and at the mercy of FEMA officials.)
Our top NASA officials should have science background, along with some solid policy and technology experience. Rhode does not. It seems that the Bush administration keeps topping its own worst picks record by choosing yet another politically connected insider for a job he’s apparently not-too-well-qualified-for. Rhode’s background apparently includes NO science and little technology expertise, he began his career as a TV reporter (not that being a journalist is bad, and I know some science journalists who have more science background than Rhode does), and wiggled his way into a series of policy jobs that appear to have been political payoff for his support of Bush/Cheney. Okay, let’s call this what it is: patronage. And,there are some jobs and places in our government where patronage hurts (think FEMA). NASA is another.
And you have to wonder why some kids in the U.S. think that NASA is irrelevant. When we see such poorly chosen officials rewarded with patronage jobs at the top of the NASA administration, it begins to look like our space agency isn’t taken seriously by the administration. These people seem to operate at the center of an alternate universe where ideology trumps logic and scientific expertise. Will “Mr. Mousse” choose politics over safety as he “advises” the NASA administrator in the months to come? We don’t want to see any more disasters at NASA, and we especially don’t want to see loss of life, followed by a Rose Garden medal ceremony for this hack, and a “heckuva job, Rhodie” slap on the back from his political godfathers in the White House.
An interesting note: the Washington Post picked this story up late Friday (the usual time the White House announces bad news) from the Associated Press, but I see nothing on it on CNN or MSNBC or any of the other main news outlets (as of Saturday night). Let’s see how it unfolds over the next few days.