Watch the head of NASA's devastating response to Ted Cruz in defense of science

This morning Texas Senator Ted Cruz announced he’s running for president.

His views on climate change are now well known — while he doesn’t deny outright that it’s occurring, he doesn’t believe we should be doing much about it.

Not surprisingly, the scientific community has some problems with this — something that was crystallized just last week.

In an exchange with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Cruz asked whether NASA was spending too much of its budget on Warth, and not enough on space.

Bolden starts out by responding with some wonky stuff about how budget items are counted, but then starts to hint at what he really means:

“You can’t go anywhere if you don’t have a place from which to launch,” he says.

“We can’t go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don’t know it. And that’s understanding our environment.”

He continues:

“As Senator Nelson said,  it is absolutely critical that we understand earth’s environment because this is the only place that we have to live. Having had the opportunity to view it from where — I look around, I’m not sure anyone else has had this opportunity — we’ve got to take care of it, and the only way we can take care of it is that we know what’s happening. And the only way we know what’s happening is to use instruments that we develop in NASA. And we do it better than anybody else.”

Ted Cruz is a problematic candidate in other ways — click here to read about what his announcement means for Hispanics »

Rob covers business, economics and the environment for Fusion. He previously worked at Business Insider. He grew up in Chicago.