NASA's foremost mission? Improve relations with Muslims.

bit_pattern said:
You're right. A much better approach would be to never engage the Muslim world ever
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A much better approach would be for NASA to focus on its primary job, space exploration, and let the state department take the lead on the diplomatic front.

and to entrench the us-against-them mentality as an immutable natural law,
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Want some alfalfa to go with your straw?

after all they are mere barbarians who have never contributed to the total sum of scientific understanding and whose scientists could never, ever bring anything of any benefit to the table.
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It doesn't matter what they did hundreds of years ago. And it's not even primarily about scientists, it's primarily about engineers. And no, they don't have any significant number with the required skills. Which is related to the fact that they don't have space programs worth mentioning. If they want to invest in such programs, we should be willing to help out, but it should not be a top priority for NASA. It's not a productive use of our resources. Even if our priority is outreach, NASA isn't an efficient venue to do it.
 
I've always felt that the FCC's foremost mission should be the improvement of relations with French Canadians.
 
Ziggurat said:
it should not be a top priority for NASA. It's not a productive use of our resources. Even if our priority is outreach, NASA isn't an efficient venue to do it.
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Good thing it isn't NASA's top priority then :p

Bolden was merely saying (when speaking to a Muslim audience I might add, hardly a policy announcement) that reaching out to Muslim nations is a priority for the outreach programme. What's so bad about that? Oh, that's right, it's the perfect lede for a right-wing broadcaster to push their bigoted and xenophobic agenda!

White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told FoxNews.com that Bolden's statements were consistent with the Obama administration's call for greater international cooperation in space.

"Bob Jacobs, NASA's assistant administrator for public affairs, echoed that point. However, he said that Bolden was speaking of priorities when it came to 'outreach' and not about NASA's primary missions of 'science, aeronautics and space exploration.' He said the 'core mission' is exploration and that it was unfortunate Bolden's comments are now being viewed through a 'partisan prism.'"

http://www.spacenews.com/commentaries/100706-fromwires-better-relations-muslim-world.html
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bit_pattern said:
Good thing it isn't NASA's top priority then :p

Bolden was merely saying (when speaking to a Muslim audience I might add, hardly a policy announcement) that reaching out to Muslim nations is a priority for the outreach programme. What's so bad about that? Oh, that's right, it's the perfect lede for a right-wing broadcaster to push their bigoted and xenophobic agenda!
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Made funnier by the fact that Muslims have flown with NASA before

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_bin_Salman_bin_Abdulaziz_Al_Saud

First Muslim, first Arab, and first member of a Royal family to fly
 
WildCat said:
The space station gave the shuttle a place to go, preferably with people from different countries. Isn't it great how we can all get along in space, just like Star Trek!
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:D Too bad we can only do this on a space station orbiting earth and not on earth itself.
 
bit_pattern said:
Good thing it isn't NASA's top priority then :p

Bolden was merely saying (when speaking to a Muslim audience I might add, hardly a policy announcement) that reaching out to Muslim nations is a priority for the outreach programme.
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No, he wasn't. He said it was a top priority for him, as the head of NASA. Not a top priority for the outreach program, a top priority period.

What's so bad about that? Oh, that's right, it's the perfect lede for a right-wing broadcaster to push their bigoted and xenophobic agenda!
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Your defense is to basically lie about what he said, and then smear anyone who criticizes him. Maybe that will play well to the choir, but that's all it's good for.
 
I wonder when NASA finds evidence of life on other planets (and it will, within our lifetimes), how will this improve relations with Islam?
 
MG1962 said:
Made funnier by the fact that Muslims have flown with NASA before

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_bin_Salman_bin_Abdulaziz_Al_Saud

First Muslim, first Arab, and first member of a Royal family to fly
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I wonder... was it a coincidence that he's a member of the royal family? Or are the royals in SA really just smarter than everyone else?

Or did he essentially pay his way onto the shuttle, since he was "payload specialist", and the payload was ARABSAT-1B? Which was only Arab in the sense that they paid for it (the French built it)?

As far as I can tell, the only significant contribution Saudi Arabia actually made was money. I'm not one for turning down money, but NASA's primary goals are not fund-raising.
 
Pardalis said:
I wonder when NASA finds evidence of life on other planets (and it will, within our lifetimes), how will this improve relations with Islam?
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It will give us someone else to be ignorant xenophobes about
 
well its not too far off...

moon-plaque.jpg
 
And we left the Moon with a similar message

Here Man completed his first explorations of the Moon. December 1972 AD. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind
 
MG1962 said:
It will give us someone else to be ignorant xenophobes about
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You missed the point. Wouldn't finding other life on other worlds get in direct conflict with Islam's dogmas? The same goes for Christianity, but NASA's administrator didn't talk about Christianity.
 
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Pardalis said:
You missed the point. Wouldn't finding other life on other worlds get in direct conflict with Islam's dogmas? The same goes for Christianity, but NASA's administrator didn't talk about Christianity.
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i can see the headlines on al jazeera now

"Great Satan fakes life on other planets to draw Muslims away from Allah"
 
bit_pattern said:
after all they are mere barbarians who have never contributed to the total sum of scientific understanding and whose scientists could never, ever bring anything of any benefit to the table.
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That may have been true centuries ago, but have they contributed recently?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_science#Decline
In the early twentieth century ulema forbade the learning of foreign languages and dissection of human bodies in the medical school in Iran.[47] The ulama at the Islamic university of Al-Azhar in Cairo taught the Ptolemaic astronomical system (in which the sun circles the earth) until compelled to adopt the Copernican system by the Egyptian government in 1961.[48]
In recent years, the lagging of the Muslim world in science is manifest in the disproportionately small amount of scientific output as measured by citations of articles published in internationally circulating science journals, annual expenditures on research and development, and numbers of research scientists and engineers.[49] Skepticism of science among some Muslims is reflected in issues such as resistance in Muslim northern Nigeria to polio inoculation, which some believe is "an imaginary thing created in the West or it is a ploy to get us to submit to this evil agenda."[50]
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Alot of Islamic scholars and Imams view science, progress and technology as a sin, and a Jewish conspiracy.

Here's a very interesting article about the problems between science and Islam

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/science-and-islam/
 
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