If you were around in the sixties, you remember the scene: the family gathers around the TV, listening to Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra explain in delicious detail what was about to happen as a digital clock on the corner of the screen wound its way down to zero, ever so slowly. Then – finally – the roar of the mightiest engines every built. The cheers. The majestic sight of a Saturn V creeping up past the launch gantry as mission control solemnly declared: “Lift off. We have lift off at seven minutes past the hour.”

It was heady stuff, in a world of endless possibilities. We knew, without a doubt, that we could go anywhere, do anything and that we would continue to answer the burning human question that has driven mankind to new heights for millennia: what’s out there?

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The President of the United States, according to this story in the Orlando Sentinel, doesn’t seem to share that sense of wonder or to understand the educational, societal and economic value that comes along with indulging natural human curiosity about the universe we live in. If he has his way, Obama will replace the sonorous call to “boldly go where no man has gone before” with a mere murmur, to blandly study what everyone has been studying for years.

“We certainly don’t need to go back to the moon,” said one administration official, as if that explained everything. One could point to a host of things this administration has done that it didn’t have to do that cost a hell of a lot more (TARP comes immediately to mind) than the $5 billion per year or so that NASA budgeted for the Constellation project, designed to get us back to the moon by 2020 and to Mars after that.

Constellation is not about going back to the moon, or to Mars, per se. It’s about getting back out there, pushing the science and finding out what’s over the next hill. There’s a sense of wonder and national pride that goes along with space exploration of course, but there are also very real, tangible benefits that society realizes as side benefits when we engage in this kind, or any other kind, of basic research. Because this unimaginative administration can not conceive of such benefits does not mean that Constellation program will be bereft of them. Our experience with NASA tells us quite the opposite.

But if not Constellation, then what? From the Sentinel story:

In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change — and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system possible.

Just what we need: more climate change monitoring. Today, NASA is running about twenty missions that are directly or indirectly related to global warming and the environment. They’ve got satellites studying ice, ocean levels, clouds, ozone, hurricane formation and atmospheric temperatures, just to name a few. That’s in addition to the legions of scientists poring over surface temperature records and computer models. How much more climate change study do we need, especially since as long as Dr. James Hansen remains employed by NASA we all know what the agency’s official climate change opinion is going to be anyway: we’re all going to die! How many more resources do we have to dedicate to solving a problem that – in the opinion of this scientist and many others – doesn’t actually exist? We’ve even got the CIA spying on carbon dioxide now. What else do we need to do?

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This administration literally spends an awful lot of time looking in the mirror instead of out the window. Its ill-considered choice of how to utilize the agency that has long represented the best of both American science and spirit is another depressing reminder that Barack Obama doesn’t understand the nation he governs or the people in it.