The flap over NASA administrator Charles Bolden’s call for the space agency to reach out to Muslim nations in a recent interview with Al Jazeera is alive and well in the conservative media, despite having faded from mainstream headlines following the White House press secretary’s dismissal Monday of the comment as a misstatement.
FoxNews.com reports that Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) — ranking member on the committee that oversees NASA’s budgeting in the House — says that Bolden told him personally in June that President Obama asked him to find ways to use NASA’s international partnerships to reach out to the Muslim world, before the controversial Al Jazeera interview.
Fox reported that Olson had said that “Bolden described the outreach program as part of the administration’s space plan during a conversation they had.”
“He confirmed it to me,” Olson told the site. NASA did not respond to a request for comment on Olson’s statements.
But Olson also confirmed what NASA told me at the time: whatever the plan to include the Muslim world in NASA’s international missions (Bolden described his vision as essentially calling on Muslim countries to contribute technical know how to NASA missions in the way partners like Russia, Japan and the European Union have for years), nothing has come of the talk.
“Olson said that to his knowledge no collaboration with Muslim countries actually took place,” Fox reports.
That fact, of course, hasn’t kept the right from whipping itself into a Ground Zero Mosque-level fury over the statements by Bolden. The Fox News article summarizes the Republican fears nicely. “[Olson] said such a collaboration could raise concern about missile technology falling into the wrong hands,” the site reports.
But not everyone sees Bolden’s comments as dangerous, or even all that new. Former Bush administration ambassador John Bolton — no fan of many traditional U.S. international partnerships — “echoed Bolden’s comments to Al Jazeera” and told Fox that “NASA now needs international help to do what it once did on its own.”
Houston Chronicle science reporter Eric Berger suggests there’s another reason why Republican members of Congress from Texas (like Olson) might be interested in keeping the story of Bolden’s Al Jazeera interview alive:
The comments come at a very difficult time for Bolden and his administration, which is working very hard to obtain consent in Congress for the President’s desire to cancel much of the Constellation Program in favor of different hardware.
This imbroglio over Muslim inclusion in NASA’s mission will very likely only harden the opposition of key Republican senators from Alabama, Texas and other states who want to see Constellation continue.
