When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was 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 ... and math and engineering,"

Question: Are you in some sort of diplomatic role .. to win hearts and minds?

Bolden: NO NO, not at all. Its not a diplomatic anything. What it is - is that it is trying to expand our outreach so that we get more people who can contribute to the things that we do - the international Space Station is as great as it is because we have a conglomerate of about 15 plus nations who have contributed something to that partnership that has made it what it is today ..."

Bolden’s trip, and this interview in particular, are part of the sustained effort to deconstruct the artificial narrative that al-Qaeda and the like are desperately trying to fool the Arab world into believing: that there is an inevitable clash of civilizations between the Muslim and Christian worlds. This world-view is the basis of Islamist terrorism, the source of their funding, but most importantly the idea that generates new recruits. This source denied, Islamist terrorism will wither. Obama has to walk a fine line, employing direct military action to destroy the terrorist infrastructure that already exists, while projecting an image of the U.S. that directly counters the terrorists’ grand fantasy. Restricting U.S. policy to military action alone, while it destroys the existing infrastructure, will serve to expand the radical base from which terrorism grows. In addition, the power of al-Qaeda and their ilk must be reduced by removing the ideological bedrock that allows them to grow. Exploiting NASA’s image, perhaps the finest aspect of the U.S. from a foreign perspective, is a very effective way of doing this. This strategy is behind Bolden’s trip, and is why Obama’s first interview was to al-Jazeera. It’s not because Obama’s a secretive Islamist, but because deflating Islamism, even more so than defeating it, is a national security imperative.

Mosque on Mars by 2015. Lets make this happen.

Mosque on Mars by 2015. Lets make this happen.

It's not often I have the chance to relate a story about Islam in spaaaaaaaace.


Apparently you don't need a mosque on the moon in order to hear the call to prayer. Hold on, this is going to get a little weird...

A few years ago, my sister and brother-in-law had occasion to visit Oman for a few weeks. During their trip, they were surprised to discover that there's actually a quite wide-spread belief in Oman that Neil Armstrong converted to Islam. There's two versions of the rumor:

The first is that, while on the moon, Armstrong heard a strange wailing sound in a language he couldn't understand. Some years later, he took a trip to Egypt, where he heard the morning call to prayer (Azaan). Immediately he realized it was the same sound he heard on the moon and he converted to Islam.

The second, less common version is that while Armstrong was exploring the moon, he discovered a huge crack that went all the way around the circumference of the moon. Puzzled, he started to make some inquiries about the mysterious crack when he returned to Earth. At some point, someone told him the story about how Muhammad divided the moon in half, and Armstrong immediately converted to Islam.

I'm not making this up.

The rumor has been so persistent that -- according to James R. Hansen in First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (p631) and numerous other sources -- in 1983, the U.S. State Department had to issue a statement to its various embassies in the Muslim world firmly denying the rumor.