Nope. NASA’s about building confidence in the Muslim world. (Although, as Mark Steyn has written at length, they’re not the ones with the deficiency of confidence.)

In a recent interview with al-Jazeera, NASA head Charles Bolden had this to say about the priorities set by Obama:

“When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things. One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

I guess the administration’s important ”feel good” work has kept NASA too busy to update its own website– which continues to offer the following outmoded (and surely imperialistic) mission statement:

NASA’s mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.

SEE ALSO: Not satire, evidently: Obama turning NASA into tool for “Muslim outreach”

UPDATE: Jim Treacher writes,

Thanks for inventing algebra, you guys. Great job!

There, I was able to do that without needing a huge federal bureaucracy that was created for an entirely different purpose.

And an incredulous Krauthammer reacts to this “new height in fatuousness”:

WASHINGTON — NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said Tuesday that President Barack Obama has asked him to “find ways to reach out to dominantly Muslim countries” as the White House pushes the space agency to become a tool of international diplomacy.

…

“We really like Indonesia because the State Department, the Department of Education [and] other agencies in the U.S. are reaching out to Indonesia as the largest Muslim nation in the world. We would love to establish partners there,” Bolden said.

I am struggling to reconcile this with NASA’s avowed raison d’être:

NASA’s mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.

I guess the space we’re exploring here is the moronic outer limits of political correctness.

H/T Mitch.

H/T Barry.