*sigh* It may just be time to take NASA out back behind the barn and put a bullet in it’s head because after twenty-five years of landing on, well, land, it looks like the next design revision of Orion will be splashdowns only. Apparently nothing has progressed in conglomerate-built spaceflight since 1962. NASA might as well have joint activities with the Society For Creative Anachronism. More anger and FUD to be found at the NASA Spaceflight.com forums.
On the other hand, NASA is very good at burning heaps of cash on ugly-ass graphics. Check out this prime piece of bureaucratic-speak from the NASA Office Of Strategic Communications:
I am pleased to provide you with the final NASA Message Construct. These messages have been market tested and have proven to resonate best with the general public.
The Message Construct serves to guide your communication efforts with the general public. We are asking that you use the Core Message: “NASA explores for answers that power our future,” in the text of your communications material and that it be used verbatim. We also have developed a graphic element to illustrate and enhance the Core Message. The graphic element is: Inspiration + Innovation + Discovery = Future. The graphic element is to be used on all Agency communications materials. The other messages in the Message Construct are also market-tested and should be used where best applicable.
Here’s the graphic element in question:
Yuck! Doesn’t the new Core Message make you want to fly into space? Maybe now it’s not so surprising that a couple of astronauts are hitting the sauce.
Meanwhile, I’ll await the day when someone makes a “SpaceShipTwo, Government Zero” sign.
I may sound like a complete stupid and naive idiot. But over the past couple of decades I’ve been so pissed at what Nasa has done and the legacy their leaving.
We could and should be exploring much more. There’s so much out there that could benefit humankind. Energy and material resources that could really propel us to the next stage of development. But no one is able to make the right investment.
Instead we’re just raping the earth of its finite resources and hunkering down. Soon we’ll be trapped on this planet as we use up everything.
There seem to be two forces at work and I’m not sure which one is leading so to speak…
First is institutional dryrot. NASA administration has been hanging onto Apollo like an alcoholic 50 year old hangs onto his old high school football trophy and has done what I thought was impossible – make manned space exploration uncool and kind of a joke. JPL is NASA’s battered wife – able to keep things going on the scraps that fall from the table but perpetually having to meekly go back to get a pittiance for another Mars lander.
The second force is more troubling and that’s a growing nationwide distrust of basic science, knowledge, and common sense. Ironically, this is happening in parallel with the rise of nerds and nerd culture but I don’t really see that translating into any kind of societal progress. The intelligence shortage might just be more important than the energy shortage.