JSC Is Abandoning NASA History
Keith’s note: NASA JSC is shutting down its Media Research Center. The MRC employees, with more than a century of collective service stretching back to the Apollo era, are being laid off effective 22 October. The building that houses this team will be closed. All materials will be put in boxes – and forgotten. This is a stupid, short-sighted decision. All too soon these boxes will get moved again and again as floor/shelf space is needed for more urgent things, labels will come off boxes, people will dig through the boxes looking for souvenirs that will end up on eBay, and the people who originally managed the contents will disappear. In so doing NASA will have lost yet another big chunk of its history.
I have seen the effect of this bad habit on NASA’s part with my own eyes. Once you stop maintaing a resource like this it invariably disintegrates. Yet JSC seems to think that hosting longhorns and prairie chickens is a more important use of its limited funds.
Petitioning NASA Johnson Space Center – Please Save the Media Resource Center!, Change.org
Keith, I think your title is in error. While the MRC also supports history, these are the people responsible for getting the video and imagery products from the current human space missions, cataloging them, writing the captions, identifying the keywords, and getting the imagery out to the media. When the media requests imagery on specific subjects these people do the research to find the needed products.
The current NASA human space program management feel they don’t need to tell the story of what they do. And further, they do not even think its worthwhile to give out the raw materials so that others can tell the story.
Shortsighted stupidity of hsf management is what this is about.
http://www.timeshighereduca…
I suppose the least they could do is to donate the materials to the local library? This still makes the materials a pain to access but it is still better than no access at all.
Correct me if this can’t be done at all.
Sounds like a good idea. Those who do not remember the mistakes of the past ar condemned to repeat them.
I imagine it would be a good crowdfunding opportunity to create a managed archive at a nearby university, including document scanning, conservation, and cataloging, along with a internet portal.
When JSC got rid of its technical library (which, in retrospect, was probably the beginning of the end) they gave the books to the local university. For a while, employees could go there and check them out. Now, even that is gone.
If I were in Houston I would be spending time dumpster diving.
It would be interesting to know whether anyone left in the external relations organization has mapped out how the tasks of the MRC are now going to be done? Or do they assume the tasks simply go away, in which case there is no longer a mechanism or process for getting imagery out to the media, in which case NASA essentially disappears from view-not an intelligent way to run a multi-billion dollar program, and all that to save how much, maybe $200K? These were not high salaried NASA SES’s or even engineers.
The NASA external relations organization has been very weak for a long time. Their communications, media and education programs do not compare with virtually any other NASA center, especially since these people have responsibility for communicating the nation’s human space flight program. If we want human space flight then its an important role and they have not been equal to the task. They got by for years as long as a Shuttle launch every few months caught the public’s interest but no one even knows there is a space station.
These are also the people who delivered a sub-par proposal for a Shuttle Orbiter, and that turned out with a decision of no Shuttle for JSC. These are the people who condone and support snot exhibits and other stupid stuff at Space Center Houston. These are the people who could not come up with a plan to raise a few dollars to create a Saturn V center that would have been worth seeing, instead they got an eyesore of a tin shed.
JSC external relations needs an overhaul of its management. The management should have been the first people to go. A recent OPM pole showed that NASA employees have no respect for their management; the managers have been placed without regard to their experience, education or accomplishments. It would be interesting to see whether any of the external relations managers have backgrounds that support their jobs.
Can you provide a link to this survey/pole?
Thanks
It’s poll not pole.
first it was the lunar landing tapes, now this. you’re absolutely correct, if no-one is taking care of the material it will “degrade”
I suspect some abuses occurred in this office. There are rumors about excessive spending and subpar media productions that were never released.
Of course, in typical NASA management fashion they found it easier to eliminate it all together than fix the problem.
Fixing the problem would require the ability to fire people that aren’t good at their job and hiring ones that are. But that’s not possible with civil servants.
I was surprised recently to learn that you can’t simply download a decent picture of any random shuttle astronaut. I wanted some pictures of astronauts I’ve met for my child’s room. The JSC website is a maze of blind alleys that sometimes end in a page that tells you to get them from somewhere else. Dryden / Armstrong has had a great website for more than 10 years with high res pictures of each and every flying machine that has passed through that facility. They also have pictures of their test pilots. Finally I was helped in a very prompt fashion by some people at the NASA HQ History Program office. Maybe they are just taking over where JSC has dropped the ball.
That’s how the Glenn L. Martin Museum got started in 1990. Martin Marietta donated the part of their archive that they thought was significant to the NASM. The rest was to be discarded. About 10-15 local aviation buffs (including myself), historians, and Martin employees formed a quick ad hoc group to save the rest. Now Lockheed Martin often comes to us when they want to highlight past legacies. A similar action should occur for JSC’S archives.
http://www.mdairmuseum.org/