NASA Wears Many Hats It Seems
by Joe?Pulcinella
During the heady days of the Apollo missions, no one would have questioned the necessity of NASA. However, a few decades, a couple explosions and several billions of dollars later (as well as the first successful private space launch), people are starting to wonder whether or not we really a full-blown government agency to bring space to our doorsteps.
So NASA has set out to reinvent itself spending as much money on PR as it does on actual missions. The new list of necessary programs includes a space station (with astronauts constantly shuttled up with no other job than to fix something up there), a new space race with China to capture the moon and?a manned mission to Mars. Not enough to prove how much you really need them? How about this?
NASA and its Applied Sciences Program will be using 14 satellites to watch the Earth?s environment and help predict and prevent infectious disease outbreaks around the world.?
Through orbiting satellites, data is collected daily to monitor environmental changes. That information is then passed on to agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense who then apply the data to predict and track disease outbreaks and assist in making public health policy decisions. The use of remote sensing technology helps scientists predict the outbreak of some of the most common and deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola, West Nile virus and Rift Valley Fever.
Well, there you have it. Even if we don't need NASA to take pictures of stars and stuff, we need them as an adjunct to the CDC (and soon every other government tax-eater).