NASA Fumbles Space Station Research Solicitation
Keith’s 11 Sep note: One of the ways to contact NASA procurement personnel is by fax. This is the case at all government agencies. Indeed, NASA’s various field centers incude Fax numbers in procurement notices. But not NASA HQ (it would seem). Oddly, all of their fax machines seem to have the same number i.e. 000-000-0000 as is seen on this current procurement notice Research Opportunities in Materials Science – MaterialsLab Open Science Campaigns for Experiments on the International Space Station. This notice states “Questions with regard to responding to this NRA may be addressed to the contacts referenced in the full solicitation document.” So … are they really suggesting that you send a fax (if that’s how you need to communicate) to 000-000-0000?
Keith’s 15 Sep update: NASA’s response is that they put the 000-000-0000 in so that people will call or email and not fax. Duh, why not just say that in the notice?
Keith, you’ve got some good reasons to complain here, but you emphasized the worst one. The information which is supposed to be available.on line isn’t. The alternate means of contacting them don’t work. That’s a real concern and grounds for complaint. But not using fax? That means of communication is almost as obsulete as the telegraph. Possibly more, since there still are.a few.uses.for.Morse code. It would make more sense to object to listing fax as a means of contact at all, rather than complaining that it’s listed but doesn’t work.
Totally agree,.email the proposal..fax machines are a thing of the past…
You haven’t been on Capitol Hill recently, so it would seem.
No question that it is sloppy posting. But, NSPIRES and other government web equivalents are the right way to receive responses and manage procurements. The link is secure unlike email and there are audit trails to indicate who has been looking at what – quite important when dealing with proprietary information. If NASA does not provide email addresses, monitor those addresses, and respond to questions in a timely manner, then there’s a problem.
Actually this is a trick HQ people use when they want to limit input.
Then, it is dirty pool. Especially if it violates the FAR as currently written.
If someone needs to fax me their idea, opinion, or proposal because they can’t send me a PDF via email then I really do not want it. However, and Keith I am sure you are aware, there are some at the HQ who still have problems attaching documents to emails, let alone using Acrobat. #justsayin
There are still fax machines? I thought those went extinct with pagers and floppy disks…
I don’t reminder the last time I sent a fax, but it was years ago…
And folks wonder why we are still stuck in LEO 🙂
Using faxes is surprisingly common in DC. They are harder to catalog/file (i.e. be leaked or obtained via FOIA), they are intrinsically analog so they’re an easy way to send simple confidential stuff point to point without encryption, and its an easy way to sign things. We still use paper for other things despite digital alternatives yes?
Not really. The schools I teach for online, like UM, went fully digital years ago. The “papers” students submit are converted to digital documents, scanned for evidence of plagiarism, then opened in software that allows grading comments to be added digitally. Even the contracts are signed electronically so I barely use pens as well. I do have a ten year old printer in my office, but hardly use it.
I understand the FOIA aspect, as they often fade out after a few years. By the time they are able to be released they will probably be blank sheets again 🙂
BTW, in the 1980’s a professor gave me task of finding a card reader to salvage a bunch of programs and data on key punch cards. Following the suggestion of another faculty I eventually tracked down a firm that still had one, in DC. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised faxes are making their last stand there as well.
Digital encryption when emailing confidential documents isn’t that hard these days. The tools can be built into the email programs that corporations use. Corporations are also increasingly using digital signatures instead of signing paper with a pen. The productivity gains by using these technologies, instead of antiquated fax machines, is worth the minor cost.
I agree with Keith that faxes remain common in Washington, but I ascribe that to the general lack of technical knowledge regarding information systems and human factors.
If I absolutely have to fax I do it via an internet virtual fax (I think it is located in UK so a little slow). The software allows online signing and similar notations. Fax is generally less secure than digital communication since there is no intrinsic verification of identity in the actual fax transmission, and a graphic signature has had no security value since the invention of the scanner. The main problem with email submission of NASA proposals is that the submission website server is of limited capacity and tends to overload a few minutes before the deadline when everyone scrambles to submit.
I disagree with the assertion that fax use is still commonplace in backward old dinosaur Washington. Maybe in some pockets, but definitely not as a matter of common routine. I work at one of those giant bureaucracy agencies, and nearly all of my communication is “Washington stuff.” Everything has been digital – for acquisition and all other purposes I can think of – for many years. My personal experience with digital communication being required for acquisition goes back at least to 2002. We don’t even have paper file storage any more. Our old fax machine is still down the hall somewhere, and may even still work (?!), but is the same one we had at least 15 years ago. We don’t even get spam on it any more. It could have value as a backup if email encryption goes wonky, but that’s about all the use I can imagine. Even then we have other digital ways to try first.
The announcement is a little sloppy, but I would need evidence before interpreting it as a deliberate attempt to undermine fair competition (the statement that this is a common practice is a very serious assertion). My completely uneducated guess is that they don’t have a working fax machine any more, but the outdated computer system posts the field anyway. If the rest of the contact info is anything less than clear and perfectly accurate, that is the bigger problem.
I’ve had to fax documents to health insurance companies more than once in the semi-recent past. They want a written signature, plus they seem to relish annoying their “customers”.
The company I work for builds electronic hardware, some of it very cutting edge stuff … and we have one customer who uses fax for placing orders. We have one ancient fax machine sitting in the front office that’s always on, just for that guy.
Uh … there are FAR and other legal reasons why Faxes are needed. There are also practical reasons. The rest of NASA complies. But not NASA HQ.
Could you go into more detail about that? What part of FAR requires the use of fax? I knew some parts of it are archaic, but this is one I didn’t know about. On the other hand, there is still a law on the books in Washington, D.C. about riding your horse on the sidewalk versus the street.
Yes, it could be a good example to my students on how poorly written laws/regulations slow the adoption of new technologies and reduce productivity, not to mention preventing the replacement of technologies that harm the environment.
If ISS is not that useful in LEO once FALCON HEAVY is flying why not boost ISS to an L point around the moon and use it to stage moon industrialisation.
Dumping it in the ocean just seems stupid?
We only spent 100 billion to build the dam thing. Let’s get our money’s worth out of it. Don’t reboots it anyway well every reboots could send it farther out right?
The main problem with your idea is that the ISS was never designed for operating beyond low Earth orbit.
It orbits within the inner Van Allen Belts, which protect it from a significant amount of radiation. The Earth-Moon and Earth-Sun Lagrangian points are all outside the Van Allen Belts. I suspect there are other systems (heating/cooling, communications, etc.) that were designed with LEO operations in mind. While the modular science racks can plug in and out of the lab segments, I also suspect there are infrastructure components that were only designed for a life span that will be approached in the 2020’s and are not nearly as easy to replace.
Up-rating the ISS systems to handle a longer life in deep(er) space would likely be more awkward and costly than trying to develop a properly designed Lagrangian Point station from scratch.
Well, it would be much less useful at an L point, for several reasons.
First off, the ISS isn’t designed to handle the forces involved in boosting it to an L point. It would just be ripped into pieces. If your comeback is to boost it slowly so it doesn’t go to pieces, then you spend a long time going through the Van Allen belts, where the intense radiation would damage or destroy most of the electronics on board the ISS.
Oh, and also, the ISS doesn’t have the radiation shielding necessary to protect the crews from solar flares or galactic cosmic rays.
And also it would overheat. The ISS is designed for the orbit that it is in, where it spends just over 40 minutes of each 90 minute orbit in the shadow of the Earth, during that time it both does not have the sun’s heat to warm it up and so it cools down by radiating heat out into space. If it were in constant sunlight, the cooling systems would be overloaded.
No matter how you slice it, an L-point space station is going to have to be purpose-built.