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NASA's Confused Policy on Advertising

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
February 25, 2013
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Education & Public Outreach, Lars Perkins, Chairman Education and Public Outreach Committee NASA Advisory Council 29 November 2012
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NASA Says It Cannot Advertise – and Then Buys Advertisements, (NASA Watch posting referenced in this NASA Advisory Council Chart).
Keith’s 25 August 2011 note: I have lost count how many times people at NASA have told me that they cannot self-promote, advertise, lobby, or otherwise try to use standard marketing tools to inform the public of the things that they do. They always cite dire Congressional prohibitions against such activities. Then they go off and totally violate these prohibitions with advertising procurements such as this one. I am not certain that they actually know what it is they are allowed or not allowed to do and just throw this answer out when they do not want to do something.
Keith’s update: This story has not changed. If you ask, NASA tells you that it cannot advertise. And then they do.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

8 responses to “NASA's Confused Policy on Advertising”

  1. Littrow says:
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    I think NASA has a genuine fear of trying to do anything at all, especially when it comes to trying to ‘toot their own horn’. I think the fear comes about because they genuinely have little internal discussion about what they should or could be doing. All of that was oriented around missions that don’t hapen too frequently any longer.  NASA is, after all, an organization run by engineers, money managers, and politicians. In the last couple of years they seem to have lost their way because everyone knew astronauts were America’s heros, except now most astronauts are no longer American and most of our astronauts have little to do except wait for some future far off flight; and everyone knew that a good launch was worthy of some recognition, but there are few big launches anymore. It is easier to do nothing. Once in awhile the rogues make it into the public but its pretty rare-few and far between.   

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      Accepting that what you say about missions is true, the situation is further aggravated by the number of times that people get bent out of shape when NASA personnel are found to be working on other, non-mission activities.  I find that frustrating.  If they haven’t been assigned any missions, and they aren’t “supposed to be” working on non-mission-related activities, then they might as well all go home.  Something very basic seems to be broken.

      • Littrow says:
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        I think too much emphasis on missions and operations over the last quarter century has done NASA in. NASA’s original focus was research, design, development, test and engineering. There were experts in other areas, like people in the news room who had been educated and experienced in news paper or news radio management, or people in education who had degress and experience in education, but most  engineers were involved in R&D and DDT&E. There was a relatively small contingent involved in missions and operations. About five years into Shuttle that began to change when NASA outsourced R&D and DDT&E, and the real engineers became contract managers, The mission/ops people started growing and took over. 

        How does this effect advertising? In NASA and government, advertising includes things like media and education. What sorts of people does NASA have managing these functions? An NTSB Chairwoman who’s main experience was as a realtor and who’s documented management difficulty was communicating with people? Engineers who have never been in a classroom?   HR managers? An astronaut/engineer promoted into a position of education leadership because his father was a teacher? It is funny and tragic to see people who have no knowledge and no demonstrated experience or interest put into these leadership positions when there is no shortage of capable, trained, experienced, educated and qualified people.

        All those mission oriented ops people-they need to be learning how to do R&D and DDT&E. That is the primary need. Once they know how to do that they could be rotated through an ops/mission position for a couple of years. If they want to get involved in advertising, media or education, let them get some basic education in the appropriate field and then rotate them through one of the appropriate departments for some experience. There is no shortage of engineers who take pride in their work and want to tell people about it, but that doesn’t mean they are trained in advertising, media or education. NASA needs to get back to its roots and promotions and leadership need to once again be based on useful and applicable experience and education.

        • Steve Whitfield says:
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          All those mission oriented ops people-they need to be learning how to do R&D and DDT&E

          Many of us have made the suggestion that NASA should be moving back in this direction, back to where they were in the beginning and where they did the most good.  The problem is that it seems NASA people themselves don’t want this, nor do the politicians nor a majority of the (interested) public.  Recall that when President Obama proposed a 5-year hold-off on working on a big LV and proposed instead spending that 5 years investing in necessary R&D almost everybody rejected the idea, and generally did so without offering any reasons why not.  Almost everybody seems to want NASA to be working on exciting missions (especially HSF missions), yet at the same time, almost everybody complains that NASA does a poor job of doing missions (especially HSF missions).  Typically, only the JPL planetary missions (and rovers much more than landers) seem to get support from the public, the politicians (for the most part) and from within other areas of NASA itself.

          Given this seemingly almost universal attitude, how do we convince NASA people to want to learn “how to do R&D and DDT&E” and convince NASA management to adopt this change?  You might get a lot of people to agree that it’s a good idea, but personally they themselves will still want to play rocket man.  It’s one of those ideas that makes a lot of sense conceptually, but is an impossible nightmare for implementation and follow-through.  I suspect that nothing short of “volunteer or we’ll have to let you go” would do the trick.  But that still leaves the problem of money — would Congress be willing to fund NASA through the transition period, which would probably take 2 to 3 years absolute minimum?  Although it would be a good long-term strategy, NASA would essentially be completely non-productive (in the traditional sense)  throughout the entire transition period.

          If NASA is to transition back to an R&D/industry support agency, then the only way to accomplish this may well be by doing it a little bit at a time, one R&D project replacing one mission program on a regular basis.  But doing it that way, the selling and funding problems don’t go away, they just get a little bit easier to deal with, but will go on for a much longer period of time.

          I would say that Congress is the only agency in a position to mandate this sort of change and perhaps get away with it, but Congress would be the last bunch to agree to such a change because it basically eliminates, or at a minimum drastically reduces, their sources of pork, which they’ll never go for.

          As much as I agree with your statement, it resembles belling the cat.  Until we can devise a palatable implementation method for it, I’m afraid it’s unfortunately just not going to happen.

  2. xMaxSmartx says:
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    NASA Policy:  “We reserve the right to really mean it.”