Wednesday - January 28, 2004

Category Image NASA is Pathetic


NASA, the gathering of bureaucrats and pencil pushers that spend our money sending useless things into space, is pathetic in spending our money and giving us very little in return.

After their initial success in landing on the moon with Apollo 11, they've been going downhill since, with only a few modest successes of note.

Why am I upset about them today? Because we've landed two rovers on Mars and the public knows pitifully little about them.


This photo is pretty much what passes for keeping us informed.

When the last rover, named Pathfinder, landed on Mars the presentation on their website was designed for children. The latest rover landings are no longer childishly presented, but they don't tell us much.

I don't want much, but they've got scores and scores of engineers and scientists, let alone administrative assistants, bean counters and web designers working on this project, yet they don't tell us what is going on.

For example, one of the rovers has malfunctioned. We've had one or two uninformative paragraphs telling us that fact and nothing more. They don't theorize, they don't speculate what went wrong, they don't tell us what they plan to try to fix it. Almost nothing.



This photograph is pretty much what suffices for science. They tell us that it's a great photo, they tell us that geologists are happy to see these rocks, but they don't say why that is.

Okay, we just spent $820 million dollars sending these two craft to the fourth planet from the sun, and all we get are a very few number of pictures. I wish I could get that kind of money without keeping my stockholders informed.

NASA is losing the public relations effort. If they can't articulate why we're spending this money, they will become more and more irrelevent. I expect the reasons to be somewhat esoteric because clearly there is no national security issue with being on Mars, but they can try a bit harder to make it interesting. I'm trying very, very hard to follow what's happening, but they don't provide much info at all.

NASA has become nothing more than a boondoggle for engineers, a bonanza for aerospace contractors, and a vehicle for utopian socialist one-world government projects. Oh, and sometimes its a jingoistic platform for planting our flag around the solar system. I don't mind much of this because that's the way the world goes around, but at least they can get one of their project managers' assistants to write some daily copy on what the heck they're doing on these very visible and potentially dramatic escapades.

But they don't. They treat us like children and expect us to go ooh and aah over a few pictures with no commentary and accept their pronouncements that they're doing something worthwhile. They're pathetic.

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