NASA Has A Process To Verify Presidential Tweets To/From Space
NASA debunks bogus Trump tweet sent from ‘ISS’, NY Post
“That tweet is fake. It’s just someone having fun,” said NASA social media manager John Yembrick. He said space station tweets are managed from the ground in Houston, and that the offending tweet came from a bogus account. The social media team at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston flagged the tweet last night and verified it wasn’t real, Yembrick said.”
Keith’s note: So … someone from the news media actually thought there was a chance that someone at NASA – possibly the President – tweeted something from space – and they contacted NASA to see if this was real — and someone at NASA JSC PAO had to actually “flag”, and then “verify” that the tweet was not real? How does one do that? Is there a procedure for this at NASA JSC PAO? Apparently implementing common sense has a process at NASA too – you can’t just use it. Larger image
Keith’s update: According to NASA PAO the NY Post did not call NASA to confirm the validity of this tweet first. Indeed, the NY Post posted originally posted a story as if this was a real thing. Then again, we are living in the Trumpiverse.
Honestly, the idea that people should follow the official procedures and process, rather than using common sense, is fairly common within NASA and has been for some time. An engineer who skips a step in an official test procedure because it is obviously irrelevant to the current case can get in trouble. Even if everyone agrees he was right about the irrelevance. Why should you expect NASA treat social media issues differently?
“Why should you expect NASA treat social media issues differently?”
Let me get back to you, I have to check on the correct procedure for treating it the same or differently.
Our so-called legal system is replete with similar stories- deadlines missed for whatever reason, for instance, resulting in unfair treatment.
This is not an engineering exercise. It is a NASA Public Affairs issue.
There was once a time when it would be obvious for many reasons why this invitation would not be offered
I was thinking of something less extreme. As a hypothetical example, say a test procedure said, “Before continuing to step 12, verify that the outside air temperature is above freezing. Write down the temperature on line 11 of the test report form.” Imagine what would happen to a technician who skipped that step, just because it was August in Florida.
Or, as a real example, a friend was once providing hardware for a flight mission. He was asked to explain why his electronics were sensitive to radio-frequency noise in the 0.1-50 MHz range, and why he wasn’t following standard practices to make the electronics insensitive. It took some time to explain that the hardware was a plasma wave antenna, a scientific instrument _designed_ to measure electromagnetic waves in that frequency range, that making it insensitive would sort of defeat the point, and they had their own, non-standard practices to make sure they only picked up natural signals, not those from the spacecraft.
And this isn’t just an engineering issue. It creeps into all sorts of things. The silliest example (not, fortunately, with my current employer) was travel to two meetings in Europe on consecutive weeks. Staying on that side of the Atlantic gave me a three-day weekend in between. Since that was technically adding vacation to a business trip, policy required checking and proving this was less expensive that making two separate trips. That is, flying back from the Netherlands on Friday, having enough time at home to do my laundry, and then flying back across the Atlantic to France on Saturday night/Sunday morning. You’d think common sense would tell them that two round-trip tickets would be more expensive than one, but the policies required checking.
Look at the tweet date stamp: 03/02/2017.
Month Day Year.
That’s not a US date notation. Probably done by someone who doesn’t use US date formatting and made a mistake.
The “ISS Tweet” had me going for a few minutes when it first appeared until I saw another Tweet pointing out that the message is dated in March!