Making The Research Application More Tedious at NASA

Editor’s 20 Mar update: I got a note from the nasaprs.com folks: “The solicitation was not intentionally posted without copy capability. That function is now available. Thank you for bringing the issue to our attention.”

Editor’s 18 Mar note: On 22 February 2006 NASA JSC published a presolicitation notice Ground-based Studies in Radiation Biology stating that the NRA would be available “on or about March 7, 2006 by opening the NASA Research Opportunities homepage at http://nspires.nasaprs.com/“

A week late, on 15 March 2006, NASA issued a new Ground Based Studies in Radiation Biology.

People who wish to propose have only a month to prepare their Step-1 proposals. If NASA thinks their initial Step-1 proposal is worth pursuing they then have an additional 2 months to submit a Step-2 proposal.

Contrary to the way NASA used to do things, to make the sharing of information more difficult, NASA has now deliberately made it impossible to copy text out of this PDF document. Yet if you look at a solicitation for the same sort of work from 2004 copying of text from that PDF document is allowed.

At at time when research is being gutted across the agency you’d think that NASA would try and make what research remains easier to apply for – not more difficult.