Metro

Muslim push unNASAsary

A former head of NASA yesterday blasted the space agency’s surprising new goal of making Muslim countries feel good about their contributions to science, math and engineering as a “perversion” of its original mission.

“NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Michael Griffin, who headed the agency under President George W. Bush, told the San Francisco Examiner.

“That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.”

NASA’s current administrator, Charles Bolden, recently said that President Obama told him the agency’s “foremost” mission was to “to reach out to the Muslim world.”

The space agency yesterday released a statement clarifying its mission, saying, “NASA’s core mission is exploration . . . Inherent to the success of that mission is cooperation and collaboration with other nations.”

jennifer.fermino@nypost.com