Alan Kay also came up with the Dynabook concept in 1968, although I don't know if at that time it was a tablet concept, or a laptop.

Who said the manned space program is NASA's main purpose? Have you read either the Space Act or their mission statement? Earth observation and science has always been a major part of their purpose.

Furthermore, you have no idea how NASA is funded, do you? It's not like if all of NASA's Earth observation activities were shifted to NOAA, Congress would suddenly give NASA more money for the manned space program.

Finally, it's kind of comical that you seem to consider Earth observation satellites "only vaguely space-related at best".

Iran got an advanced centrifuge design from A.Q. Khan that is extremely difficult to operate in practice. (We also interdicted the supply of some of the advanced machine components it requires.) For some reason, they stuck with it, and eventually got it to work. That's why it's taken them so long to get significant enrichment.

Now, if they were on a crash program to build a bomb, they could have abandoned it and pursued a simpler earlier Soviet design. So I agree it's not their first priority. Indeed, the fact that they stuck with the expensive but efficient technology suggests that they want more than to just "build a bomb".

However, that doesn't preclude a dual program, to pursue civilian uses, but retain the option of building a bomb as well. I suspect that's their real intention, and there is evidence that they've done some preliminary weapons work (such as implosion devices and delivery systems, IIRC). Iraq actually used (chemical) WMDs against them in the 1980s, and with all the U.S. activity in the region, they may eventually want a deterrent.

It doesn't further exploration of space. My point is that exploration of space is not the only thing NASA does, nor the only thing that it is tasked to do.

I'm sympathetic to cuts in both exploration and science, but my point is that NASA is supposed to, does, and should, do both.

Furthermore, my reading of this year's NASA budget indicates that Earth Science got a 0.2% cut over the previous year, while Exploration got a 6.5% increase. ("Science" as a whole got a 0.2% increase, due entirely to a 3.7% boost to Planetary Science, which IMHO also counts as space exploration.)

Oh good grief. Talk about tortured logic.

Let me explain this to you simply: the scientific purpose of GRACE is not to "discover gravity". It is directly to measure the Earth's gravitational field. Indirectly, it is to discover a lot of things about geoscience (ice dynamics, hydrology, etc.).

I may also point out to you that (as has been noted elsewhere in the comments) the Space Act which chartered NASA explicitly states that part of its mission is to expand human knowledge of the Earth (using spaceborne technology).

Evidently. Read NASA's mission statement. "Scientific discovery" features prominently. GRACE is a space mission, you know. NASA does tons of scientific space missions, both for Earth observing and other observation.

That's why I said it looks like you need both LAGEOS and GRACE.

The GRACE gravity field data product has monthly time resolution.

Measuring the melting of the Earth's ice sheets, such as the GRACE mission does, is not a clearly defined goal? And should we just stop doing basic geoscience simply because it's politically controversial?

Partial answer: GRACE has a horizontal spatial resolution of several hundred kilometers. I think its time resolution ends up being monthly, after a lot of post-processing of data from individual orbits (not realtime). So pretty far from what's required. There's talk of a GRACE follow-on mission with 1 angstrom inter-satellite distance resolution (compared to its current micrometer resolution). Not sure what that would translate into in terms of Earth's gravity field resolution.

Scientific discovery using spaceborne instruments, such as GRACE, is part of NASA's core mission.

See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.

Making gravity measurements, building the instruments to make gravity measurements, and the rockets to fly them, ARE their respective fields of expertise.

Your tax dollars pay them to build and fly the GRACE mission and many other Earth-observing missions. So they already are focusing on what their tax dollars pay them to do. All of which, by the way, fall under NASA's mission statement.

Absolutely. Spaceborne measurements of the Earth's gravitational field are both bad science and contradict NASA's primary mission ("to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research").

GRACE's main use in climate change is to detect the loss of mass from melting glaciers (mostly in Greenland and Antarctica), which results in sea level rise. It can also help map surface currents in the ocean, and track the motion of water through the hydrological cycle.