The NASA Education Office Is Now STEMOPS
Subcommittee Approves FY2019 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Bill (NASA Excerpt)
“$110 million is provided for the NASA’s education programs, which were proposed to be eliminated in the budget request, under a newly named Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Opportunities activity. Within STEM Opportunities, Space Grant is funded at $44 million, NASA’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) is funded at $21 million, the Minority University Research and Education Project is funded at $33 million, and STEM Education and Accountability projects is funded at $12 million.”
Keith’s note: On one hand it is great that Senate appropriators halted the White House attempt to slash education funding at NASA (BTW the Obama White House tried to do the same thing). But then there’s this goofy renaming of the NASA Office of Education to the NASA Office of “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Opportunities”. “STEM” is almost always used in a sentence with “education”. So why not just leave it as the NASA Office of Education? The organization will seemingly do the exact same things that it has always done with the same budget albeit with this wordy title.
This would be like renaming NASA’s Aeronautics Directorate as the “Wings, Engines, Aerodynamics and Development (WEAD)” Directorate. I remain baffled as to the rationale for this. Maybe they do not want to offend the Department of Education (which is doing such a wonderful job of undermining education on its own). But I digress. Again, the good news is that NASA education is being saved. But we’re also telling students that its better to use wordy phrases and acronyms when the proper word choice is a single, illustrative word. But then again, that is what NASA is famous for: its acronyms. So I guess we call this organization STEMOPS now.
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Everyone’s got to the play the game, I guess legislators need to make changes they can report on paper.
For the more paranoid who take these types of things as a signal that the government has a strategy in controlling the (pedantic) language used, I wonder what the goal would be.
Like Jimmy Durante used to say, “Everybody’s gotta get inta the act!” Or like the makers of the patent medicine Hadacol…they Hada Col it Something! They have no imagination. If they did, they would find a NAME for the SLS! (Not that I find “BFR” very imaginative.)
Ad Luna! Ad Ares! AD ASTRA!
BFR works if you know about “Doom” and that is how he is going to use it against Old Space. 🙂 IF he gets it into orbit before the SLS, then SLS will be DOA regardless of what NASA renames it.
BTW Elon Musk has posted the first job openings for the workers he needs to build the BFR.
Looks like Game On 🙂
https://www.teslarati.com/s…
SpaceX posts first BFR-dedicated job posting – wanna build a Mars rocket?
“Currently targeting the first half of 2019 for initial hop tests with a prototype spaceship (upper stage) and 2020 for the first full-up orbital tests of the booster and ship. Job postings specific to BFR signify the beginning of serious R&D expansion and acceleration.”
Man! Would I love to be in on that project! My birthday is next month. If you have access to a time machine, and can take fifty years off my birthday, I’d be out there in a nanosecond!
Even if BFR/BFS doesn’t beat SLS into active service, there is also Blue Origin. The Old Space dinosaurs must…though they won’t admit it, maybe even to themselves…be really frightened by those furry little mammals running around at their feet!
All the best to these new pioneers!
“Acid-on-the-hands rocket engineer” (before N2O4)
Yes, both sides are now able to claim victory. The Office of Education was replaced with an Office focused on STEM. Gotta love the Beltway 🙂
STEMOPS is almost as bad an acronym as LOP-G. Somebody at NASA needs to take a course in marketing 101. A good name helps sell a product.
I’m still waiting for them to come up with a catchy name for SLS, like Saturn or Atlas have.
I like Nissan’s giant SUV name: Armada.
A single ship which sails only once a year, at most, can not be called an Armada. How about the _Vasa_ or the _Mary_Rose_? They were extremely large ships for their time, sailed once, capsized and sunk.
Later correction: I just looked it up, and I was completely unfair to the _Mary_Rose_. Although a bit of a white elephant, she sailed for many years before sinking.
Why are you presuming that the name must actually correspond to the truth? Folks have been wrenching words away from the truth they are attached to (and vice versa) for a long, long time.
Bad acronyms are all over the place. One of my favorite instruments on a Mars orbiter is STATIC (the SuperThermal And Thermal Ion Composition instrument). I also consider the PI to be one of the best in his field. But I can’t think of any positive connotations for “static.” Noise? Stationary and non-dynamic? I’m also curious if anyone can confirm or deny the existence of a UK organization from the 1950s or 60s, called the Army Rocket Sounding Establishment.
I’m a big fan of STP-H3-Vader, the “Space Test Program – Houston 3 – Variable emissivity device Aerogel insulation blanket Dual zone thermal control Experiment suite for Responsive space”, now there’s a group of people who confidently threw the rules of making an acronym out the window.
One of the small planetary spacecraft studies NASA funded last year was called “JUpiter MagnetosPheric boundary ExploreR (JUMPER)” I think the entire planetary magnetospheres community told the PI that (1) it’s a cool idea and (2) pulling random letters out of the middle of a word to make an acronym is cheating.
Sometimes new labels can spark renewed energy, and allow the folks doing the task to shake off bureaucratic hindrances that have accumulated down through the years.
Noble thought. Bad label choice.
Personally I’ve grown tired of the STEM mantra. Folks perceive (or seek to exploit) a specific deficiency and inflate it beyond its reality to the detriment of the original larger objective or set of objectives. Since folks have inserted Art already into this cultural wave (STEAM), will they soon rediscover a W for Writing, and then an O for Organization, and an R for Reading, and another M for Music, an SEL for Social-Emotional Learning, and a CCT for Creative & Critical Thought, and… (STEAMWORMSELCCT…)
…or will we finally get back to the entire vital task at hand and use the word that already covers them all a.k.a. Education?
By the way, what’s Bart writing on the board in the image? I’m not getting a high enough resolution image to read it. (I did like the “Rocket Science is Not a Business Plan” Keith put in a similar image some time ago.)
Resolved: The Commerce Department’s SPACE Administration is proof that intelligent life does not exist inside the beltway.
It is a long traditon that any NASA program needs a forced acronym to win support. I was hoping that Kilopower presaged the end of this wierd tradition but obviously I was wrong. When the Sputnik went up and we suddenly realized we were behind, the federal government put money into science education in 1958 under the National Defense Education Act; no acronym was used.