Reading up on JUNO, I’ve just spent some time prowling through the NASA website getting caught up on their scientific activities in space. Besides the great deep space observatories in orbit and planned, there are a variety of platforms studying the solar system’s worlds, the sun, and the space environment.

I’ve been vaguely aware of all of this, but I’ve heard so much bad press on NASA lately I hadn’t realized just how much good work it was doing. Sure, maybe the manned space program is in pretty bad shape, but lets face it, it never did get much of value accomplished when it was consuming such enormous amounts of money during the Shuttle days. Meanwhile, we are now systematically surveying the solar system and the space environment, doing all the preliminary work that will have to be done before we can start any ambitious program of manned exploration.

When you consider the work being done by the Europeans and others, our planet’s space exploration efforts are doing quite well. Maybe they’re not as far along as I would have hoped, but they seem to be doing much better than I’d been led to believe. And we have the ISS in place, so even the manned program is getting something accomplished.

NASA is earning its keep, and it is, in my opinion, in a position to absorb a massive increased investment in funding if any of these scientific missions turn up anything unusual or extraordinary that desperately needs following up on.

We are getting our money’s worth.