NAC Vs PAO On Transparency
NAC notes: Wayne Hale, closing today's NASA Advisory Council meeting, suggested the agency would be better served by increased transparency, citing public affairs "happy words" vs more frequent briefings/discussion of technical challenges, problems and solutions
— William Harwood (@cbs_spacenews) January 19, 2022
The more PAO blows sunshine up the public’s collective butts and glosses over delays they lose credibility. Talk about the delays and challenges driving them instead of for six months of rah rah posts when internally the delay is already clear. The every six month update on delays is not winning any fans and why folks say SpaceX does while NASA PowerPoints.
There seems to be no plan or strategy for what NASA does. They seem only to be reporting big positive ‘milestones’ and almost all of them as far as Artemis, SLS and Orion focus on setting new (and delayed) launch dates. So while a NET launch date might be nice, when it gets delayed for 10 years in a row, 120 months, all it winds up being is a loss of credibility. We’ll all be surprised if it ever launches.
50 years ago NASA would publish monthly status updates identifying progress and activities. Of course after 120 months of seemingly little progress with old technology, that does not seem too positive either.
I remember when our local TV stations would run the monthly NASA PAO “Aeronautics and Space Report” short films back in the 60’s. The equivalent today is their “This Week At NASA” that runs on NASA TV. That is all well and good, but they would reach a wider audience if they disseminated it to local TV stations.
NASA public affairs for a long time has been all about saying only positive sounding things. Nobody wants anything negative portrayed. I doubt the public affairs people actually know anything about what is happening; all they have are positive throw down words that have no basis in what is happening.
Also would be good to spend less time commemorating endless Apollo anniversaries.
I suspect they will avoid commemorating one on December 14 of this year.