Foreign Perspectives

When the news is largely boring as it often is in the summer months I sometimes flick over to Al Jazeera to see what they’ve to say about things.

Obviously it’s got more of an interest in middle eastern affairs so the mix of news is a bit different. However, for the most part the difference is more of a matter of depth of coverage much as CNN cover American news stories in more depth than the BBC do.

However, where it got more interesting was a week or so back when they were interviewing the boss of NASA.

Whereas most of us in the western world would consider NASA as a purely civilian outfit, the Al Jazeera interviewer seemed almost to consider it as a purely military outfit. Thus, he continually pressed Major General Bolden about the arms race in the 1960s that got America to the moon and about the military satellites which they launch and both of which Bolden evaded answering properly. Overall it seemed a very antagonistic interview.

The thing is though that although Bolden evaded both issues in fact were it not for the cold war in the 1960s it’s unlikely that America would have had the impetus to their space programme to go to the moon quite so quickly. The Sputnik flying unchallenged over American airspace certainly wasn’t appreciated when America had nothing similar at the time. Likewise, although NASA is a civilian organisation by and large, it does launch a number of military satellites and there seems little point in evading that issue. Indeed on their own website NASA are quite open about some of their military launches such as the GPS satellites.

It’s certainly interesting now and again to see just how different a viewpoint some in the Arab world have of what America gets up to.