Griffin Urges That You "Police" Free Speech and Make People Who Speak Out Feel "Unwelcome".
NASA Policy on the Release of Information to News and Information Media, 30 March 2006
“(a) NASA, a scientific and technical agency, is committed to a culture of openness with the media and public that values the free exchange of ideas, data, and information as part of scientific and technical inquiry. Scientific and technical information from or about Agency programs and projects will be accurate and unfiltered.”
“Let us speak openly and honestly about the problems we face in carrying out our nation’s space program. Over the course of my career in this business, I have often been disheartened by the large number of diverse “entrepreneurs” in search of NASA funding who place their self interests over the greater good of the aerospace community. They do not respect the priorities set out for NASA by our duly-elected stakeholders in the White House and Congress, or even the priorities of their own respective science communities in National Academy decadal surveys. Even worse, the rift and harsh rhetoric between proponents of robotic science and human spaceflight does not help our nation’s overall space effort one iota, but it does cause division that weakens us. If we wish a better reality for tomorrow, we as a community must police this behavior; those who engage in it must be made to feel, and be, unwelcome in the community at large. My hope for today is that there will in the future be more respect for each others’ work.”
Editor’s note: Mike Griffin’s statements at the Goddard Memorial Symposium last week would seem to utterly contradict what NASA put forth in the communications policy issued in March 2006. And just who does Mike Griffin think he is by advocating that anyone should “police” speech in a country where such speech is protected by the Constitution – under any possible circumstance as it relates to NASA? Moreover, what possible moral or legal authority does he have to suggest that “those who engage in it must be made to feel, and be, unwelcome in the community at large”? The fact that a Presidential appointee would say things like this in public – on the record – is troubling.
I hear a clock ticking.
