Meetings on Public Opinion on Space Closed to the Public
Extracting Public and Stakeholder Opinions: Unusual Suspects Need Not Apply, ECAST
“Public opinion in this country is everything,” stated President Abraham Lincoln in 1859. Fast-forward 154 years to the age of trending Twitter topics and 24-hour cable news. Public opinion seems to have a significant effect on social issues and in some cases, like the recent DOMA Act repeal, triggers changes in policy. However, its influence over science and technology policy is far less, where stakeholder opinion reins supreme. The general public is largely excluded, on the grounds that they are uninformed and therefore their opinions are not particularly useful for policymaking.
This de facto policy of exclusion was recently demonstrated at the National Research Council Committee On Human Spaceflight’s meetings. The meetings on public and stakeholder opinions were closed to the public, with the exception of the first 30-minute, early morning session.”
Yet Another Slow Motion Advisory Committee on Human Space Flight
“… the committee’s advice will be out of synch with reality and somewhat overtaken by events having taken a total of 3 years, 7 months to complete. Oh yes: the cost of this study? $3.6 million. The soonest that a NASA budget could be crafted that took this committee’s advice into account would be the FY 2016 budget request. NASA and OMB will interact on the FY 2016 budget during Fall 2014 and it won’t be announced until early 2015 – 4 1/2 years after this committee and its advice was requested in the NASA Authorization Act 2010.”
Keith’s note: This committee had a meeting in the vacation community of Woods Hole, MA from 24-26 July 2013. No agenda was posted – and apparently none will be posted. The entire meeting – one that dicussed public input – was closed. Indeed this web page says “No outside materials were distributed to the committee.”, Go figure.
*Sigh* I’m not even mad anymore. It’s just “sit through the tedium of these never-ending reports because at the end of the day, at least we’ve got the unmanned program doing good stuff.”
NRC Committee meetings are usually only public when they bring in outside speakers. Discussion is usually held in closed session to protect the individual views of committee members. On the Public Opinion panel meeting, the expertise was already on the panel so they didn’t need speakers, hence the closed meeting. This last meeting was a report shaping/writing meeting, so it was held in the NRC writing location and no outside speakers were needed.
You are just being an apologist for the NRC (and you were an intern there too, right?). This is an elitist group with no public accountability that conducts most of its events in secret even though the NRC contract to prepare this report on NASA is paid with tax dollars. The members of this panel are afraid to take a stand publicly so how much are their opinions really worth – especially when it comes to public input, public perceptions, and government outreach? I have been to their Woods Hole Facility. It is a lush exclusive enclave in the middle of a tourist location where no expense is spared and a lot of time is spent at receptions and eating out. What on Earth are they spending $3.6 million on? Think of what NASA could have done in terms of education and public outreach with that money. As for the “expertise” on the public opinion panel the NRC picked people who have niche experience and are afraid to interact with the public – seems to be hypocritical and inefficient to say the least.
Yes, I am being an apologist in the sense that I’m adding clarifying facts to a conversation without including opinion. And yes, I did have the privilege to work there as an intern so I have some insight into what goes on. I don’t know where the $3.6M is going, but I don’t think it’s fair to assume that any dollars earmarked by Congress for a specific purpose would have gone to other NASA pots if not so earmarked.
One opinion without any factual back-up: I think that someone in NASA HQ or OMB intentionally slow-rolled the start of this study to avoid Congress getting any public leverage (NRC is primarily seen by Congress as a leverage tool) before the 2013 reauth discussions. The official story I was told is confusion relating to ongoing CRs and budget uncertainty prevented funding from becoming available.
I wasn’t involved with the public opinion panel selections, but it appears that they brought on experts in both qualitative and quantitative public opinion polling that are not related to spaceflight except for Roger Launius, who is one of the few people I know who are looking at hard data related to spaceflight and public opinion (Amy Kaminski and Linda Billings are a couple of others who are doing good work). Those are the people I would want to “Solicit broadly-based, but directed, public and stakeholder input to understand better the motivations, goals, and possible evolution of human spaceflight and to characterize its value to the public and other stakeholders.” If I had to guess based on the committee makeup I would say that open call for white papers was not the input that this panel is using. I think they are using some of that $3.6M to put together a questionnaire and collect opinion from a non-biased sample of the US public (which they could not report out until publication for sample integrity).
The NRC says that this committee’s work costs $3.6M. It is on the NRC website. As for who the committee brought in for their vacation in Woods Hole there is nothing mentioned on the NRC website – the meeting was closed so who knows. But if Roger, Amy and/or Linda were involved then that is good. But we will never know what they said and how the NRC committee responded since the NRC has adopted a black out on much of this committee’s activities.
I hope they are doing a questionnaire like that. And I hope we get to see the results. I imagine a lot of non-biased people, in the course of taking the questionnaire, will be thinking in the vein of “what the hell has been going on since Apollo?” Not to take anything away from Shuttle and Station but it has been a long time since Apollo and pretty much everybody will think we should be further along in human exploration developments.