It should be a very high priority for the State Department. NASA should have higher priorities.

If you want symbolism, buy a painting. You want world peace, you either need to find common ground (infeasable in this case) or make war unacceptably expensive. Symbolism never stopped a war. It just distracts folks while real actions are happening somewhere else.

The issue with the Muslim outreach isn’t that per se, but rather the incongruously high priority that it seems to have been given over actual accomplishments in space.

Seems to me that world peace and defusing the tensions between the U.S. and the Muslim world should be a very high priority.

“Actual accomplishments in space” will happen regardless, sooner or later. If we have to keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars on problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the ongoing Israel saga, that’s money siphoned away from other projects including NASA.

We’ve flown a Saudi in space, and we’ve flown an Israeli in space. If we could get both an Arab and an Israeli on the ISS at the same time, it would be a major symbolic step forward in world peace. Nixon agreed to Apollo-Soyuz as a symbol of detente. It might not have been much science but it sure told the world we intended to put the Cold War behind us.

It only sounds ‘incongruous’ to those listening through a filter designed with a biased agenda opposed to the Obama administration in general (which you have already indicated.) It’s no more of a ‘high priority’ than it would be if Bolden had been speaking to a group of Eagle Scouts and favored his comments for that audience as well.

The issue with the Muslim outreach isn’t that per se, but rather the incongruously high priority that it seems to have been given over actual accomplishments in space.

http://spaceksc.blogspot.com/2010/07/much-ado-about-nothing.html

I paid a few dollars to go through newspaper archives from the period now online. It seems that the U.S. got quite a bit of positive publicity in the Arab world from flying the Saudi prince on Discovery in 1985.

Too bad nobody followed up on it until now.

Funny how when the Reagan administration wanted to commercialize space access and fly Muslims, it was okay, but now that Obama is in office it’s not. Hypocrisy, as usual, reigns supreme in certain quarters.