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Commercialization

Confusing Membership System at CASIS

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 22, 2012
Filed under , ,

Keith’s note: Last Friday I joined CASIS as a member. Ever since then, when I attempt to login all I get is “Authorization Failed! You are not authorized to view this page. You must either login or you do not have sufficient privileges to access this information …” But the page that tells me this has a link that says “logout” so I guess I am both logged in and logged out simultaneously. I am not certain how CASIS is going to build the online community it seems to desire when they cannot get something as simple as this figured out.
Keith’s update: OK, now when I log in I get sent back to the membership page. Do they still want money from me?
Previous CASIS posts

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

7 responses to “Confusing Membership System at CASIS”

  1. Juan Blanch says:
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    Keith, you are a little thick I think. Can’t you take a hint <g>.  Your login will NEVER WORK!

    • kcowing says:
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      Yea I am starting to get that impression ….

    • npng says:
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      Juan is right Keith, they put you right in to their membership page source code:

      head id=”PageHead”><title>

      Membership Form – Center for the Advancement of Science in Space

      title><meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; name=” vs_targetscheming”=””/><link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/Client/Styles/IE8Menu.css?&amp;iuqt=1″ media=”bs” input=”” type=”hidden” name=”__VIEWSTATE” id=”__VIEWSTATE” value=”” for=”” cowing,=”” keith=”NOT” allow=”” membership=”” for=”” cowing.keith=”NEVER” action=”” “=”” log=”” in=”” +=”” log=”” out”=” confuser-function Cowing, Keith
      USE ” authorization=”” failed”=”” action=”/Client/reject all logins like Cowing + Keith”>

  2. npng says:
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    “Keith’s update: OK, now when I log in I get sent back to the membership page. Do they still want money from me?”

    Frankly Keith, they probably don’t care about your money.  To add you to a list of donaters and claim the visibility of your participation is probably more useful to them.  The more likely scenario would be that they go back to NASA and Congress and wheel and deal for increases to the $15M/year funding.

    If they were performing superbly, it’s doubtful they’d get plus’d up beyond $15M.  Perhaps the reality of such logic is, albeit perverse, the more poorly they perform (“we need more money to do this”) the more likely they will be to get more federal money.

    They need to add a category above “Founder” called “Federal Funder” (is that Funder or Plunder?) in the $10M range, with the benefit being an annual subscription to the “Jelly of the Month” club; the gift that keeps on giving.

    No harm intended; we all want the ISS to succeed, greatly.

  3. SkyKing_rocketmail says:
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    I just take CASSIS’ confusing ‘membership’ categories, their poorly conceived web page design, and their poorly thought out organizing scheme to be representative of  how the organization functions. I don’t think it is. Given their previously non-existent track record, they are not encouraging a lot of confidence in their ability to achieve whatever their goals are, which are hard to fathom in the first place.

    If I were an experimenter hoping to fly a payload on ISS, why would I give money to an organization with a poor track record? Actually, I could ask the same question from the perspective of NASA-why would I hire an organization with such a track record to serve as my surrogate?

    CASSIS’ poor performance is not encouraging for ISS as a whole. And make no mistake, CASSIS is representing ISS. Aside from the great achievement of assembly of such a large structure, ISS has been plagued and continues NOW to be plagued by extraordinarily high costs, a lot of people in a confusing organization, and especially in the area of payloads and utilization, essentially a nonexistent program plan, which given their long existence at such high cost with so many people, is really inexcusable. If I were representing the taxpayer or stakeholder, I would be looking into how the program got into this situation and how do you fix it to make more effective use of my tax dollars?

  4. npng says:
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    In another 6 weeks or so it will be CASIS’s one year anniversary.  The honeymoon is long over and they’ve had a year to set up house. I wonder what a good anniversary gift would be for them?