Getting out the vote – way out there – the president courted the very specific nerd punk demographic when he called out the “Mohawk Guy” on the Mars rover landing team. “I, in the past, thought about getting a mohawk myself,” Obama said by Skype call with engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California. “My team keeps on discouraging me and now that he’s received marriage proposals and thousands of new Twitter followers, I think that I’m going to go back to my team and see if it makes sense.” He also made sure to mention his administration’s serious science and technology education goals.Obama did not mention anything about larger cuts to basic science research – the stuff that not only gets us to Mars and new technological milestones, but to the bottom of the biggest questions in the universe. NASA’s chiefs say everything will be okay, but current budget projections have NASA losing over ten percent of its current science budget in 2013; Obama also chopped NASA's Mars program by nearly half in his 2013 budget request, while also taking the axe to about a quarter of the agency's general planetary science budget. The Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency are also facing slashes. But rest assured, the president told the NASA engineers: “You guys are a little cooler than you used to be!”
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