On the eve of Labor Day weekend, President Trump announced that he had selected Representative Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) as his pick for NASA administrator. The announcement was posted on the White House website on September 2, and included a brief summary of Bridenstine’s experience, including his career as a naval aviator and executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum & Planetarium. Bridenstine earned a 70-percent rating on The New American’s most recent Freedom Index, which rates representatives’ votes according to the Constitution.
The Oklahoma congressman is known for being a supporter of lunar exploration and commercial space flight. He has also spoken out on the subject of climate change and disagrees with those who assert that human activity causes global warming.
Speaking to the Lunar Exploration Group last November, in an address entitled “This Is Our Sputnik Moment,” Bridenstine talked about how the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 motivated the United States to land the first man on the moon on July 20, 1969.
He also noted that 10 years after the last Apollo mission, President Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to defend the free world from nuclear ballistic missiles.
Continuing, Bridenstine said that the discovery of water ice on the moon in 1994, with evidence suggesting 10 billion tons of water ice at each lunar pole, should have immediately transformed America’s space program. He stated that this supply of water could be very useful for future space flights.
Bridenstine also supports using commercial resources for space exploration, which historically has been solely a government program. In his talk, he blamed government as the reason that the U.S. space pram has not progressed as far or as fast as many had hoped. In answer to the question, “Why, then, is it taking us so long to get there in person?” he said:
In a word: government. It turns out that, for large, visionary projects, government is occasionally good at starting the ball rolling, but absolutely terrible at preserving its momentum.
Looking back at the early period of the exploration of the Americas, Bridenstine noted that while many of the first Europeans to discover and explore the New World — Columbus, Pizarro, Cabot, Cartier, Vespucci, and the like — were chartered and funded by European governments, once the existence of a New World was established, the story of its colonization was a private one. He noted: “By the early 1600s, large numbers of private Dutch and English vessels were ferrying paying passengers across the Atlantic on one-way tickets to the New World.”
Bridenstine’s positive opinion of the value of private commercial space exploration is a hopeful sign for those who have long believed that it is inefficient and unconstitutional for space travel to be a government monopoly. He has supported space exploration efforts by private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Scientific American reported that Bridenstine has expressed disagreement with those who claim that climate change is anthropogenic — caused by human activity. In a June 2013 speech on the House floor, he disputed the role of humans in global warming and also criticized then-President Barack Obama for spending more money on climate research than on weather forecasting. The report noted that Bridenstine has worked to exclude greenhouse gases from federal regulation, and to expand oil and gas exploration on federal lands and offshore.
During a 2016 interview with Aerospace America magazine, the reporter asked Bridenstine: “Tell me your view on human contributions, if any, to what’s happening with the climate.”
Bridenstine replied:
I would say the climate is changing. It has always changed. There were periods of time long before the internal combustion engine when the Earth was warmer than it is today. Going back to the 1600s, we have had mini Ice Ages from then to now.
Bridenstine’s observations are well founded. The New American has published a wealth of material citing scientists who disagree with the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) propagandists. A few examples are:
• A May 2010 article by William F. Jasper cited Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University. According to Professor Easterbrook, author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, the Earth is now in the beginning period of a trend of global cooling. “Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 degree Fahrenheit per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel of the 4th International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago. The cooling trend, Easterbrook says, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell for the next several decades.
• A November 2015 article by Alex Newman cited a statement from NASA noting that ice across Antarctica has been growing very rapidly for decades. The surging ice growth directly contradicts the predictions of global-warming alarmists, including a 2013 report by the increasingly discredited UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claiming, falsely as it turns out, that Antarctica was losing ice at an accelerating rate and causing rising sea levels, all supposedly owing to humanity’s emissions of the “gas of life” CO2.
• And in a February 2016 article, this writer reported that a then-recent survey of 1,500 public middle-school and high-school science teachers from all 50 states revealed that only 30 percent of middle-school and 45 percent of high-school teachers think that global warming is caused mostly by human activities. The study showed that about 15 percent believe climate change is “mostly driven by natural causes,” while another 15 percent think “human and natural causes are equally important.”
If space permitted, we could offer many more such reports. Those who would like to study more information on the subject of climate change should read some of the related articles linked below. We also offer some material about the Trump administration’s proposals for our nation’s space program.
Photo: Representative Bridenstine’s official site
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