Two things, quickly:

1) If you’re in the NYC area, the American Museum of Natural History is hosting a Cassini exhibit, showing many of the beautiful images from the Saturn probe. You have plenty of time to see it; it runs through March 2009. Carolyn Porco will be giving a talk there in September, too.

2) Saturday is Astronomy Day! Universe Today has details on some events. Remember, if you’re in the Detroit area, I’m giving two talks there; one Friday night and another Saturday afternoon.

3) OK, a third thing: my friend Karen Stollznow is hosting the Skeptics’ Circle. I really need to start submitting to that. One more thing to do on a very long list of things to do.

Space Cynic is hosting this week’s Carnival of Space. Brought to you by… Rod Serling?

Speaking of NASA, while looking to see if there was any news about Weiler being the new science chief on the NASA site (no, there isn’t as I write this), I saw this at the top of their page:

Not to put too fine a point on this, but are you kidding me? They’re comparing where NASA is now to the where we were projected to be in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey"?

NASA folks, let’s be honest here: this does not cast NASA in a good light. Even the image itself is damning: in the movie, that space station was a rotating dock carrying dozens if not hundreds of personnel, and was used as a way station to the Moon, where there was a thriving and expanding lunar base. And that was all supposed to take place seven years ago.

NASA has a space station which is doing precious little if no science at all. It takes three people working full time to keep it operating. Yes, in many ways it’s a magnificent achievement, don’t get me wrong. But don’t show me a Volvo and tell me it’s a Lamborghini^*, especially when you charge me $150 billion for it.

In my opinion, the article linked from the picture does the exact opposite of what it aims to do. If you’re going to compare the predictions of a 40 year old movie — which showed an incredibly ambitious yet believable future — to today’s achievements in space, you need to do better than talk about glass cockpits and flat-screen monitors on the space station. They even say that exercise is routine on the station, and compare that to movie astronaut Frank Poole seen jogging around the rotating wheel of the interplanetary space ship Discovery. C’mon.

To me, this drives home the reality of where we are in the manned exploration of space. We have an aging Shuttle fleet which has 11 flights left before retirement, and no working rocket to replace it. We’ll have to rely on Russian spacecraft for years to ferry astronauts and equipment to space and back. The space station has taught us quite a bit about working and living in space, but we would have learned just as much — if not more — if we had built a space station that actually did something. And it’s unclear to me that we’ll be sending humans back to the Moon because of the political reality of funding long-term goals when we get new politicians elected on shorter cycles.

Which brings up a point I want to make clear. I’m a supporter of manned space flight, and you won’t find a bigger advocate for what NASA’s robots and space probes have done. And I also understand that NASA is beholden to a variety of forces, putting it at the mercy of whims and breezes from all directions. This is a very complex and delicate situation, with 535 Congresscritters all trying to get their say (with many, perhaps most, having no clue on the importance of space exploration), the White House’s desires on top of that, and a public very unclear on why NASA exists at all (and laboring under gross misunderstandings even then). The Administration at NASA has done an amazing job in most cases getting anything done at all under those circumstances.

But trying to compare where we are now to where visionary movies like "2001" were hoping we would be simply hammers home the cold hard fact that we’ve spent the past 45 years since Apollo circling the Earth. There are no Moon bases, no regular Shuttle flights to orbit, no rotating space habitats.

It’s politics, I know that. But politics is about choices, and we’ve chosen poorly. We need politicians who will choose wisely, who can see past their own term, past their own partisan desires, past the limits of gravity and atmosphere and current technology, and willing to do what we need to do, what we must do: go into space, do it the right way, the sustainable way, and explore it.

Our future is out there, just as our past predicted. We’ve stepped away from the right path, but that path is still there. We simply have to choose to step back on it.

Note added May 10, 2008: My friend and fellow astronomer and astronomy writer Chris Lintott has weighed in on this issue as well.

As I expected, NASA just announced that Ed Weiler will be the head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate for the duration. Weiler replaced Alan Stern, who stepped down a few months ago amid controversy over funding, budgets, and the Mars rovers. Weiler has a long history with NASA science and was the obvious choice for a temporary replacement for Stern, and it’s not surprising at all that he has been asked to stay on.

Typically, when a new president takes office, Agency heads and such tender their resignation. The new President can then decide whether to accept it and replace them, or to deny it and let them stay on. Hard to say what will happen to Mike Griffin when a new President takes office in January 2009, and what will happen to the top spots at NASA. It’s an interesting thing to ponder though. I’ve had both praise and vinegar for Griffin, and in many ways I’d like to see him stay on, though in other ways I wouldn’t mind seeing him replaced. He has done a great job for NASA in many many ways, though all things being equal I’d be happier with someone who thinks global warming is real and a danger and isn’t dismissive of those who disagree.

Probably more important is how a new Congress will treat NASA. So much to think about! It’ll be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next seven or eight months.

Last year I wrote about how some Apollo footage had been remastered in high definition. Now we’ve got even more: Discovery Channel has remastered more than 100 hours of footage from the early space age into high definition!

But what’s cooler than that is that this footage has been given to NASA and will be available for free from their archives!

Suhwheet.

It’ll come out in June in conjunction with a series on Discovery called "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions", a show I will no doubt be watching. The link above to MSNBC has a few minutes of the footage, though currently it’s not streamed in HD. Still, it’s purty.

This is very exciting. I remember very little of the early space age, except for the Apollo missions (I was 6 when I went to Florida with my family to see Apollo 15 launch), so this will be a fantastic way to live through it all.

Tip o’ the visor to Yishai Mendelsohn for sending me the link.

NASA historian and gadfly James Oberg wrote up a very detailed and very interesting report on the near-disastrous re-entry of a Soyuz carrying three astronauts back from the space station. This is really an epic tale; it looks like there was a system malfunction that would normally have doomed the crew. However, a similar problem occurred decades ago, and apparently Soviet engineers redesigned the re-entry vehicle to account for it should it happen again. The redesign worked quite well, and saved the lives of the crew.

I highly recommend reading this, even if you hadn’t read the original reports. I’m still very unhappy about how this played our politically, but I’m very glad that sensible engineers, whoever they may have been, were in the loop all those years ago.

That’s it. I’m done.

And may I add: ewwwwww.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’ll be on the next one just like always.