Bush: Throwing Earth out with the bathwater?

President Bush has outlined a new direction for the NASA space agency aimed at the Moon and Mars. Those are worthy and interesting targets, of course, but the changes at NASA have Earth scientists worried. The guiding document for the Moon-Mars program calls for outsourcing low-orbit missions--these are the programs that mapped the ozone hole and others that monitor global climate, the world's ice caps, pollution plumes, the water cycle and much more. Other government agencies have no money to take these over, and private industry has no profit to make from them (although there is language about "assur[ing] appropriate property rights for those who seek to develop space resources"). The University of Washington's Tad Anderson hosts a provocative editorial asking what the geologic community will do about this elephant in the attic.