White House press secretary Scott McClellan held a “press gaggle” on Air Force One Thursday morning as the President was travelling to Minnesota. A guest of the informal press briefing was presidential science advisor John Marburger, who was there to answer questions about the science initiatives unveiled in the State of the Union address. An unnamed reporter thought to ask about the Vision for Space Exploration:
Q Scott, the President’s moon/Mars mission, plan — I mean, what’s going to come of that? There’s a lot of concern about the gap when the shuttle is retired and the new vehicle hasn’t come into play yet.
DR. MARBURGER: There’s lots of other science that’s important, and there are lots of other initiatives in other agencies that are important for our country. This initiative focuses on things that we think have especially high leverage for future innovation. And that’s what this is focused on. Space exploration is another issue, it’s another important area for the country, but it’s not part of this initiative.
Q Does this indicate any shifting of priorities away from that as a top priority?
DR. MARBURGER: No, there’s no shift of priorities for the other areas.
Later in the briefing, Claude Allen, assistant to the president for domestic policy, touched on NASA’s role in the math-and-science education work planned as part of the new competitiveness initiative:
And then the last piece of this program that we’re focused on in education is to have a survey to look at all the federal programs, all the federal dollars that are going into education right now for math and science, to make sure that they also are tied to the No Child Left Behind standards so that we make sure that agencies such as NASA, that expends more than the Department of Education in math-science, that they, too, are tying their programs to that which the students can achieve, as well.
