Forty years later, the Apollo program (and its 11 missions, nine voyages to the Moon and six moon landings in just four years) seems like a dream. With budget cuts, management problems and controversies, unfunded missions and the planned end of the Space Shuttle, NASA faces an unpromising and uncertain future.

But even with the election of Barack Obama, a NASA supporter who recently suggested he wants to have “lectures in the White House where people are talking about traveling to the stars,” there is a sense that NASA’s future is not only in exploring space, but in once again looking earthward.

In 1990, on the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day, NASA announced its fifteen year program called “Mission to Planet Earth,” for earth observation satellites. That program suggests an opportunity for the future.

A recent essay by former NASA Johnson Space Center director George Abbey and former Clinton Science Advisor Neal Lane on “How to Save the U.S. Space Program” suggested that earth observations be restated as a top priority for NASA, and that coordination with other earth sciences agencies be strengthened.

One prominent reason for this mission is the Climate Crisis—a harrowing possibility known mostly by a few scientists and science-fiction writers in 1968, but now the most dangerous example of the planet’s life being seriously altered by human activity. As the federal government gets serious about addressing it, more detailed knowledge is needed about what’s actually going on in the atmosphere and on the planet’s surface. Some of that information is best gathered from space.

It’s a mission NASA is aware of, and may now be eager to take on. After all, America’s most respected scientist on the Climate Crisis (and next to Al Gore, the number one target for climate crisis deniers) is NASA’s own James A. Hansen. His own post-election statement minces no words: “Now our planet itself is in peril. Not simply the Earth, but the fate of all its species, including humanity.”
In an Orlando Sentinel oped endorsing Barack Obama for president, former astronaut Sally Ride cited his support for expanding NASA’s research capabilities “to study things like global warming…” But even under the recalcitrant Bush administration, NASA was already engaging in this work, with an upcoming mission specifically related to the Climate Crisis. Scheduled for January launch, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will be its first spacecraft dedicated to studying the chief greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. NASA satellites have also recently measured changes in Arctic sea ice and Alaskan glaciers.