Astronauts, Bill Posey Want NASA to Cool Its Jets on 'Global Warming'

A group of former astronauts and the leader of Mission Control are pleading with NASA to cool it on "global warming."

In a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunningham and fellow space farers maintain that, The global-warming hypothesis has never been proved look at the data."

The signatories, who include Mission Control boss Chris Kraft, charged that the agency is endangering the reputation of science itself by advocating the extreme position that carbon dioxide is the major cause of climate change.

U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, whose district includes the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, spoke out on the issue last year. In testimony before the House Budget Committee, Posey, R-Rockledge, noted that NASA is the only federal agency tasked with space exploration.

"So its efforts should be focused there," Posey spokesman George Cecala told Sunshine State News Monday.

"There are 16 federal agencies with $8 billion in funding to address with global warming. Meantime, NASA got no budget increase last year and a $1 billion cut this year," Cecala related.

Posey has urged that Congress "re-prioritize" human space flight and lower the priority of the climate-change issue, Cecala said.

"Let other agencies do their job. Let NASA do its job."

But NASA brass appear unmoved. A day after the astronauts' letter was sent to Bolden, James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a division of NASA, told BBC Scotland that averting global warming was a great moral issue equivalent to slavery. He called for a worldwide tax on carbon emissions and advocated a ban on the construction of coal-fired power plants.