NASA’s admission that the US Government’s first attempt to map carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had ended in disaster could be seen as yet another PR disaster for the space agency

The rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) crashed into the Pacific shortly after take off.

Now this may be just too much of a ‘grassy knoll’ observation for many but could this apparent PR nightmare be all part of a wider wrecking strategy by those losing the global warming argument?

Is it really a step too far to believe that elements within the world’s biggest polluter could sabotage its own mission that would have undoubtedly proved the global warming sceptics wrong? Once the spacecraft became operational and started churning out hard evidence about how carbon dioxide was heating up the earth, every American would face the prospect of changing the way they lived their lives forever. Rather than persisting with a lifestyle where a single small city uses up more energy than a large African country they would be forced to fundamentally reassess what it meant to be an American consumer.

Certainly conservative websites such as Free Republic aren’t shedding any tears. Their supporters argue NASA uses climate change as a scare tactic to lobby for more funding from the federal government. “Woo Hoo!” wrote one contributor “I hope it the spacecraft fell on NASA. It’s the most worthless government programme in existence,” said another.

The observatory was to orbit the Earth about 400 miles above the poles, using a telescope and three parallel, high-resolution spectrometers to measure concentrations of carbon dioxide and the molecular oxygen absorption of sunlight.

NASA wanted to study how carbon dioxide, widely believed to be responsible for climate change, cycles through the planet’s atmosphere. Despite the huge media coverage around global warming hard evidence is still scarce.

The rocket carry the facility crashed when the protective fairings covering the spacecraft during takeoff failed to separate from the rocket as it gained altitude.

The extra weight meant the rocket could not break out of the earth’s atmosphere and ultimately ended up in the ocean.

For researchers it’s the end of ten years of planning and $200 million lying at the bottom of the sea.

For the doubters who say that the idea of green house gases warming the globe is fantasy, it means they can go on filling up their 4x4s and running their air conditioners full blast without any conclusive evidence to stop them.

Scant reason to sabotage a space programme perhaps, then again Lee Harvey Oswald did kill Kennedy, didn’t he?