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NASA Can't Figure Out How To Promote Good News About Space

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 22, 2021
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NASA Can't Figure Out How To Promote Good News About Space

NIH Director Francis Collins and NASA Astronaut Kate Rubins to Keynote Joint Session at ISSRDC
“The 2021 International Space Station Research and Development Conference (ISSRDC) will include a virtual keynote session that will feature two key science figures: National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins and NASA astronaut Dr. Kate Rubins.”
The Smithsonian’s Dr. Ellen Stofan and NASA’s Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen to Keynote Day 2 Session at ISSRDC
“Dr. Ellen Stofan, under secretary for science and research at the Smithsonian Institution, will join NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, in a keynote address during the 10th annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference (ISSRDC), August 3-5.”

Keith’s note: This is a big deal: the Director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, is a Keynote speaker at the CASIS/ISS National Laboratory ISSRDC (10th Annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference) event next week. NASA has tried to get this level of visibility and recognition from the larger biomedical community for a very, very long time. Well done to ever pulled this off. And the AA for Science Mission Directorate is speaking too – a cross-pollinating event.
With all of these excellent guest speakers, you’d think that HEOMD AA Kathy Lueders and the HEOMD team would be wanting to tell everyone about this. Guess again. There is nothing mentioned on the NASA Space Station or Humans in Space web pages. There is no mention on the NASA Science Mission Directorate home page or the SMD NASA Biological & Physical Sciences page. Nothing is listed on the NASA TV schedule for this event. No NASA media advisories or press releases have been put out.
It is not surprising that NASA HEOMD, SMD, and PAO have dropped the ball on this. They never coordinate when it comes to events that reach cross disciplines – or centers – and they are incapable of envisioning the value of cross-pollinating, cross-disciplinary events like this since this means that people who never talk to each other need to talk to each other so as to share the news. Meanwhile NASA’s ISS Program Office and ISS National Lab act as if they are separate organizations. How can NASA expect that people will see a vibrant, multi-disciplinary, cutting edge research effort in space – one that is important enough to make certain that ISS continues to operate throughout the decade – if the agency can’t even get the people involved in that program to promote their own good news? Baffling.

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

5 responses to “NASA Can't Figure Out How To Promote Good News About Space”

  1. Matthew Black says:
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    I don’t think NASA is entirely to blame. The amount of anti-space sentiment and Flerther garbage reached fever pitch during Apollo 11’s 50th Anniversary in 2019 but has peaked recently with the almost bewilderingly pejorative Anti-‘Space Billionaire’ crusades online. NASA and even Elon Musk are going to have a steep hill to climb in coming years. I keep seeing “spend money on Earth; not space” viewpoints and memes spreading almost as fast as Covid it seems. The people who spout that ill-informed sh1t are acting like they are the first to ever say or think it. Sheesh…

    • Bob Mahoney says:
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      “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.”
      GK Chesterton

  2. Bob Mahoney says:
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    Maybe they can figure it out but are consistently choosing not to do so.

    Omission or commission, sin is sin.

  3. Tom Billings says:
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    NASA’s science is in the hardest variation of something every government PAO is looking at, and then looking over their shoulder to see if “the succeeding ideology” will demand their job for boosting “meritocracy”. Until they find how to adapt, and they haven’t been able to swim well in these currents for around 30 years, they will, IMHO, be *very* cautious about a shark attack mob coming for them in the educational/journalistic community they often come from.

    Keith is right that they are missing opportunities to promote NASA’s work. Here in the Portland area, that is just what some politicians want to hear. As early as 1995, I went down to McMinnville, Oregon, to give a talk on Space Jobs, at the request of a young, enthusiastic science teacher. I got there, and we set up in the largest science classroom in the brand new HS, … and the hall was empty.

    About 10 minutes into the time, a young man came in, and the teacher asked if he had distributed the posters she’d printed the previous 2 weeks before, to the other science classes, and he practically wept. Every other science teacher in the school had refused to give her poster wall space. Some let him lay the poster on an unused back table. We eventually got 2 more students, and I gave the talk, and the three students were enthusiastic.

    I then looked around that biggest science classroom, and realized that the *only* posters on the walls were about environmental science, and a single periodic table of the elements. The young lady’s Space Jobs lecture had been boycotted by the science faculty that was teaching *only* the environment, 5 days a week. I understand she got a job at the nearby Evergreen Aviation Museum the next year.

    IMHO, this is the sort of attitude that spooks any PAO, and it is as widespread today in the country as a whole as it was in Oregon 25 years ago. In particular, it is spread through the educational and journalistic community. The excellence of NASA is in something that can lose a PAO their job to promote as actively as I, and Keith, and many here want.

  4. Nick K says:
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    I have to agree that when I want to know what is going on in virtually any aspect of spaceflight, I do not rely on a NASA source. I will go to NASAWatch, or Space.com or Facebook, or myriad orher soirces. It doesnt matter whether it is todays news about Nauka, or yesterdays about commercial space, or tomorrows about a Starliner launch, or fifty year old information about an Apollo anniversary, but the one website I know I will not find the information I am looking for is NASAs. Lately I have come to rely upon Roscosmos.RU. Seems NASAs competitors are everywhere and doing a better job.