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NASA's Evaporating Spine

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 25, 2015
Filed under
NASA's Evaporating Spine

NASA Chooses Plucky Option B for Asteroid Redirect Mission, Space Policy Online
“Lightfoot was poised to reveal the Option A versus B choice in December, but when it came time for the press conference, said only that more time was needed. NASA has not publicly stated what came up at the last minute. Rumors are that Option B was the choice then, too. The December press conference was announced with 6 hours notice; today’s notice was only 2 hours and the briefing was exactly at the same time as Dava Newman’s nomination to be NASA Deputy Administrator was being considered by the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee (it was approved by the committee).”
NASA Public Affairs Is Not Interested in Dawn or Ceres, earlier post
“Dwayne Brown from NASA SMD PAO only gave trivial advance notice for media to register for a telecon regarding Dawn entering orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres. Dwayne sent a media advisory out at 12:56 pm ET for a 2:00 pm ET telecon – and only gave media 45 minutes to contact him for dial-in information. Smart move to send this out while half of the U.S. was eating lunch. Only 2 media actually dialed in to ask questions.”
Keith’s note: NASA has become increasingly gun shy about announcing its big decisions. It is also increasingly inept when it comes to assembling media briefings on these decisions – as well as major mission events. Recently they continually kicked the can down the road on commercial crew and totally bungled a Dawn event. And yet NASA gets all bent out of shape when the media does not pay attention to their news or the spin that they try to put on it. Duh, I wonder why.

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

6 responses to “NASA's Evaporating Spine”

  1. Eric Hartwell says:
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    You don’t suppose the next evolution will shrink the boulder to a stone, and deliver it directly to Earth, do you? NASA can get how-to pointers from Japan for that one. It’s terribly sad to see NASA struggling to find a use for the hugely over-budget, years-late, and under-performing hardware they’ve decided to build. So much potential, and money, gone to waste.

    • Lewis says:
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      The asteroid mission is definitely a disconnect from reality. It’s just so strange, the strangeness is a sign of sickness.

      I wonder from time to time if the F-1b will get anywhere. I don’t see much else about any of SLS that should continue. It should just be cancelled to put the whole thing out of its misery and in the past.

      It’s continuity from administration to administration. Maybe if there was a dictator some of this would work out better, but this is too awful to continue. It’s not even the money. It’s not much money in the first place, from the federal government’s perspective. I mean, they don’t even have a service module.

    • Steve P says:
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      This is beginning to sound like a duplicate of the OSIRIS-REx mission. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRI…

  2. Rich_Palermo says:
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    Put a large sticky paddle outside the ISS. Wait a year or three, scrape off the micrometeoroids and pat together into a ball. Instant asteroid/boulder/rock/whatever.

  3. Michael Spencer says:
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    This is exactly the time for true believers to start making a racket- the last days of a president that can’t be re-elected. It’s a golden opportunity.

  4. numbers_guy101 says:
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    The article hit a point usually overlooked, that of direct vs. leveraged funding, or as I would call it, fake money vs. real money. Notice the direct funding / real money is not much in one set of books. Real money is procurement dollars, but also dollars that can be diverted or found, since not all procurement dollars are easy to move from one bucket to something else and new or very different in kind. Hint as to the delay in the announcement – the real dollars may not add up yet in estimates.

    Doing this a certain way to assure an economical mission that does fit the budget box may be groundruled out. And then to boot, other near term needs are short real money in their accounts, so people are arguing about this direct real money. Gerst needs to get the exploration upper stage going next year, and also wants the augmentation module / small hab, without which SLS Orion is all dressed up with no way to go. Hence delay, till this battle leaves the 2016 last man standing after the fight over those few real dollars.