Sometimes, NASA’s promotion is fun but shameless

NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer logically_speaking

Some of the planning for some of the missions is "science", but the only reason to send anything into space is to look back at Earth. Think about it: for more than 99% of humans, it's MUCH more important to know whether it will rain tomorrow than to get some list of the components of a comet. In fact, the ONLY people who care about comets that aren't currently visible from Earth are entertaining a hobby. And since my hobbies aren't subsidized by tax money, I don't see why their hobbies should get my money. NASA started life as NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). The purpose of NACA was to perform research on PRACTICAL solutions for problems with aeroplanes: wing designs, propeller designs, engines, streamlining, etc. By the 1930s, NACA was solving problems for Army and Navy aeroplanes. NACA became NASA during the farce that was the early stages of the Space Race with the Ruskies. We now know that US intel know about the Russians' planned launch of Sputnik, and President Eisenhower told the Army to delay the launch of our first satellite as a ploy to get "emergency" funding through Congress. If Eisenhower hadn't played this expensive little game, the US would have beaten the Russians into space by a month or so. So true to its heritage, NASA continues to create crises in space to support their budget requests. At the same time, NASA has admitted that they can't produce the kind of heavy-lift booster they used back in the 1960s, so we MUST rent heavy boosters from the Russians... The reason to build the Space Shuttle was to fly stuff to the Space Station, and the reason to build the Space Station was to have somewhere for the VERY limited range Space Shuttle to go. Outer spaces is "a thousand ways to die". EVERYTHING about space travel is makes humans sick. But pictures of astronauts floating in microgravity are useful to NASA budget requests. mahuna

Science cannot be blamed for exaggerated headlines on press releases, which are more likely written by journalists like News than scientists themselves. The point being made in this particular release, though, is that the Obama administrations funding level for NASA could slow down the discovery of signs of life elsewhere in our Solar System:

WASHINGTON – National Aeronautic and Space Administration officials maintain that the New Horizons approaching Pluto in the deepest part of the solar system has transformed the way scientists view the dwarf planet and that additional space probes might even address one of man’s great unanswered questions: Does life exist outside of Earth’s boundaries?

Not quite the same as discovering extra-terrestrial intelligence elsewhere in our galaxy, for example, but it would be evidence against the claim that Earth is unique in bearing life. Seversky

Then you have this from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33720951 Comet yields ‘rich array’ of organics

Ian Wright Quotes from the write-up: “I see this cometary material that we’re analysing as frozen primordial soup. It’s the kind of stuff that if you had it, and warmed it up somehow, and put it in the right environment, with the right conditions, you may eventually get life forming out of it. “What we may be looking at here is our abiological ancestral material — this is stuff that went into the mix to produce life." “In many ways it’s quite a humbling thing to be working on, because this is life before life happened.”

The writer happily quotes him, seems to swallow it all unquestioningly, and promotes his faith with his write-up.

One leading scientist has even described the chemicals as "a frozen primordial soup". This supports the theory that comets may have seeded the early Earth with the ingredients for life.

From crev.info: He bows down before chemicals like cyanide and soot, humbled in the presence of great possibilities. So let him test it scientifically. Warm it up, put it in the right environment, in the right conditions, and see if life forms. It will be a long wait. http://crev.info/2015/08/ceres-comet-67p-dawn-philae/#sthash.GU9b3lTs.dpuf

tjguy