As NOAA has endured a series of Congressional attacks this fall for its climate change research, the agency’s administrator, Kathryn Sullivan, has largely remained silent. But the former astronaut’s wingmate for two spaceflights, Charles Bolden, has not been so reticent. The NASA administrator this week continued to blister Congress for its tack on climate change science.

After delivering a keynote speech on the commercialization of space at the SpaceCom conference in Houston Tuesday, Bolden talked to Ars about his own agency’s Earth science research. He also addressed the efforts by Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, to obtain the e-mails of NOAA climate scientists, in which Smith expects to find political influence and perhaps fraud.

“I don’t think scientists will be intimidated by the subpoenas and everything else,” Bolden said. “That may be its intent, but I don’t think it will work. It's peoples’ life’s work, and they’re not just going to walk away because somebody threatens them with a subpoena to appear before the Congress of the United States. They’ll probably welcome it, to be quite honest.”

Bolden, a four-time astronaut, was selected into the corps two years after Sullivan. During STS-31 in 1990, he was the pilot of a mission in which Sullivan helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope. Two years later, he commanded STS-45, in which Sullivan was a mission specialist during a nine-day flight focused on scientific research.

The administrator, appointed by President Obama in 2009, has made Earth science one of NASA’s priorities in recent years. The topic became an especially bright flash point this year after the president requested $1.95 billion for NASA’s Earth science budget in 2016, and congressional appropriators countered with $500 million less than the president’s request. Republican Senator Ted Cruz was a particularly harsh critic, saying the agency’s Earth science budget had increased by 41 percent from 2009 to 2016. NASA, Cruz said, should focus on its “core mission” of exploring space.

However, on Tuesday Bolden countered that he was simply trying to restore NASA’s Earth-study funding to levels that existed under the Reagan administration. “If you look at where we were for Earth science, even back in the Reagan administration, we’re trying to get it back there now,” Bolden said. “A $500 million reduction in Earth science funding interrupts the trajectory of getting the Earth science budget back to where it used to be.”

Many of the cuts to Earth science came during the George W. Bush administration. According to a 2008 report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General, funding for the agency’s Earth sciences program was reduced by 37% percent from 2001 through 2006. In reports since then, such as in the 2007 Earth science decadal survey, scientists have urged NASA to restore those cuts in order to ensure a robust program to observe the planet.

Earth science remains a relatively small piece of NASA’s overall expenditures. Since 2009, the president has asked for a total of $107 billion for NASA’s budget, of which $49 billion was spent on human spaceflight work. Only about $11 billion went to Earth science, which paid for 21 research missions to study everything from weather and climate to natural disasters.

During the interview, Bolden said he was disappointed but not surprised by the actions of Congress.

“It’s not frustrating,” he said. “It’s disappointing to see that happening. But in the end I think truth will win out. There are certain things that everyone understands. The climate is changing. We don’t know what it all means, but we’re trying to understand that. Our job is to try and provide data so that really smart people can advise people like the president, like members of Congress, if they’re interested in being advised. The Congress has a responsibility to be open to advice also. And I think when they continue to ignore facts about the climate, that’s to our detriment. It’s not to theirs, it’s to the detriment of the nation.”

Congress is expected to finalize its budget for NASA as part of an overall appropriations bill early next month.