George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming...
Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.
According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003."
Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case...
Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.
...Mr. Deutsch played a small but significant role in an intensifying effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of information to the public.
Such complaints came to the fore starting in late January, when James E. Hansen, the climate scientist, and several midlevel public affairs officers told The Times that political appointees, including Mr. Deutsch, were pressing to limit Dr. Hansen's speaking and interviews on the threats posed by global warming.
Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.
"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."
"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."
Even with the elimination of the obvious incompetents, open science will not occur with Michael Griffin at the helm of NASA. The man is a Star Wars minion of Rumsfeld and DynCorp/ CSC. Unlike the Heritage Foundation stooges, he's intelligently evil.
Despite his promises to his peers that enabled his appointment at NASA, he's looting the science budget for Star Wars-related projects.
NASA wants to divert money from its science programme to help pay for billions of dollars of projected space shuttle cost overruns, says the agency's chief, Mike Griffin. The cuts mean several key science missions will be delayed indefinitely and have sparked criticism from space enthusiasts and law makers.
Griffin and other NASA officials announced the cuts on Monday during a press briefing on US president George Bush's 2007 budget request to Congress. In the proposed budget, NASA would receive $16.8 billion in 2007, an increase of 3.2% over the amount Congress appropriated for the agency for 2006.
NASA removing $2 billion from the science budget over the next five years to help cover projected cost overruns of $3 billion to $5 billion to fly the shuttles safely until they are retired in 2010.
Redistributing NASA's budget this way represents a turnaround for Griffin, who in September 2005 specifically vowed not to take "one thin dime" from the science budget to pay for human spaceflight.
When asked about his earlier statement, Griffin stunned reporters by admitting he had to go back on his word. "I wish we hadn't had to do it; I didn't want to. But that's what we needed to do," he said. "One plain fact is NASA can simply not afford to do everything our many constituencies would like us to do."
The science programmes affected include:
• Delayed indefinitely – the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a mission to detect and study Earth-like planets
• Delayed by about three years – the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), designed to map stars with unprecedented accuracy and search for planets slightly larger than Earth will now launch no earlier than 2015
• Cancelled – four to six 1.8-metre "outrigger" telescopes designed to bolster the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii. The outriggers would have searched for planets and imaged newborn stars
• Delayed indefinitely – the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.5-metre infrared telescope built into a Boeing 747 plane, will be put under "review" because it is behind schedule. It has been given no funding for the foreseeable future
• Delayed indefinitely – NASA's cosmology programme, "Beyond Einstein", is under review. Two of its missions – LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), to search for ripples in space-time called gravitational waves, and Constellation-X, to study black holes – will be delayed indefinitely
• Cancelled/Delayed indefinitely – Mars research has been cut by $243.3 million to $700.2 million. This reflects the cancellation or indefinite postponement of missions such as the Mars Sample Return Mission and the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter
• Cut – solar system research, largely in astrobiology, has been cut by $96.5 million to $273.6 million.
NASA, and America's progressive science innovation, won't recover until all of the Administration's appointees are gone.
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I knew you would be excited about this as I was, but the "intelligently evil" in place are, as you suggested" nasty too.
I can only hope that when we need to shoot an incoming meteorite out of the sky all those star war weapons will really pay off. Can you imagine the outcry. "You mean all those billions of dollars and you still can't hit a speeding bullet? What were you doing with the money? Where was it going?"
Star Wars guy pretending his is George Baily during the run on the bank, "You don't understand. The money isn't here in a big weapon. It went into Bill's car, so that he could drive to work in luxury. It went into Jim's vacation to Scotland. It went into Sam's swimming pool and the Lockheed hooker fund for the senators. It went into the salaries for the Heritage foundation interns and the lobbyists who are going to get us more money. To actually build something like this is impossible, I thought you all understood that. That is how big science under the Republicans work. No actual science is done usually, we just keep the money coming in so we can play Wizard of Warcraft. Unfortunately some pesky actual scientists didn't get with the program and said it didn't work and won't work, but they were dealt with. As long as everyone keeps their mouth shut we will be fine. No one could have predicted that we would be threatened by an asteroid and we would actually be asked to do something with our star wars weapons. What do they think this is? A movie starting Richard Dreyfus or Bruce Willis?"
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