Inaccuracies at SaveSpace

Brevard's 'Save Space' campaign pushes for NASA funding, TCPalm.com

"Brevard County officials launched a Web site, http://www.SaveSpace.us, to try to generate 500,000 letters to President Barack Obama by Oct. 31. The Save Space Web site has racked up more than 42,000 hits since its Sept. 28 launch, said Kimberly Prosser, county spokesman. The site includes six downloadable letter templates and printable posters and banners. A campaign cornerstone: Video footage of Obama's August 2008 campaign stop in Titusville, where he pledged to "help close the gap and ensure that our space program doesn't suffer when the shuttle goes out of service."

Keith's note: I posted a comment about the misleading video that this group has posted on their Facebook page. Laden with depressing music, scare mongering titles, and highly edited short snippets taken from hours of Augustine deliberations, this video purports to focus on Augustine Option 4b which talks about shuttle derived launch vehicles. Well, it is actually a propoganda piece for the DIRECT concept - one of two shuttle-derived concepts briefed to the Augustine Committee. At one point NASA JSC's John Shannon, an advocate for the other shuttle-derived concept that was thoroughly briefed (yet ignored in this video), the Shuttle Sidemount HLV, is shown talking about a shuttle-derived launch vehicle while DIRECT imagery is shown. At no time is the Shuttle Sidemount concept even mentioned. Very deceptive.

Well, they did not like my comment, so they removed it. This is rather odd given that a decision to go with the Shuttle-derived Sidemount option is most likely to retain current Space Shuttle jobs - just as they are right now. I guess the easiest way to deal with conflicting or critical information is to ignore it or remove it.

Oh yes, "42,000 hits" since 28 September is not that much to crow about given the number of people affected by this issue and the goal of getting 500,000 letters written by this coming Saturday. Many websites that are considered "small, low traffic" do this sort of traffic in a single day. Regardless as to whether this group is referring to 42,000 "hits", "file transfers", or page views" on their website, there is a zero missing in all of their numbers that one would expect to see if their effort was actually on the path toward generating 500,000 letters by 31 October 2009.

That said, this group is not sitting down but is standing up and taking some action. Inacucracies aside, that is to be applauded - and emulated. Hopefully this sort of thing can start to happen again in the future - but not just at the last second every time some scary job loss looms - but also in the quieter times when making the value of space exploration to the entire population can be done - not just focusing upon a portion of Florida.