5 ms·

Promoted on Sunday, Fired on Monday: Inside a NASA Office's Sudden Closure

78 points by ironyman 1y ago

juujian 1y ago
> These goals are in line with the administration’s own stated priorities. Just weeks after shuttering OCS, the White House announced an executive order intended to, in its words, restore scientific integrity policies of federally funded research activities. I get that they are trying to highlight the administrations hypocrisy, but stronger wording would really be appropriate. That scientific integrity has always just been a fig leaf that should never be taken at face value, a red herring.
- quantified 1y ago
  Scientific integrity is a red herring?
  - MengerSponge 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - terminalshort 1y ago
      What lies did NASA promote?
      - mrexroad 1y ago
        Moon landing, probably. /s I normally leave flippant remarks like this to Reddit, but this make-nasa-space-again b/c earth-science-is-lies narrative is so fucking stupid it deserves a stupid response.
      - MengerSponge 1y ago
        I never said NASA was lying? They didn't issue the EO.
  - bigiain 1y ago
    The current administration's "scientific integrity" is a red herring. I good argument can be made for stronger wording than "red herring" too. I would suggest both "politically motivated lie", and "intentionally deceiving propaganda" are very close to the truth.
- nickff 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    (a) None of those are literary devices; they're all common vocabulary items that you'd expect an illiterate person to be familiar with. (b) If you are a nonnative speaker, what's the difference between looking up an unfamiliar idiom and an unfamiliar word? (c) Your pulled quote contains only two idioms. My best guess is that you're calling face value an idiom, but it is a transparent construction that means exactly what you'd expect if you knew the words face¹ and value.² ¹ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/face https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/face noun 5(a)(1) ² https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/value https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/value noun 1; 8
    - nickff 1y ago
      “Face value” is a reference to currency, postage stamps, bank-notes, and stock certificates, which have a value printed on their face, but which are not always actually worth that amount. I am a native speaker, but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_value
      - thaumasiotes 1y ago
        ...what is your comment supposed to be relevant to? You didn't refute any point. (a) These are all common vocabulary items; (b) If you are a native speaker who needs to look up a lot of words, what makes these different? ; (c) face value is not an idiom. It is compositional. What would you say if you saw a reference to someone as a "Svengali"? That is a literary allusion. It can't be an idiom because it's only one word long. Do you think it's an idiom anyway? In what sense? It's possible to understand face value as metaphorically referring to the face value of a coin, or as directly referring to the value that any given object or event appears or purports to have on its face, but in either case it won't be an idiom. > but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say This is just false. From a communications or a vocabulary perspective, there is no difference between "idioms" and "words".
gnerd00 1y ago
can someone closer to the action speak about actual issues in that office? As an outsider, it seems like there was some fishy news about the International Space Station, for example...
- nickff 1y ago
  Not an insider, but I think your comment gets to the core of the issue. One of the pictures used in the story has a Space Shuttle in it, and another has a Vehicle Assembly Building; neither of those have been used (for anything interesting to the public other than tours) for over a decade. NASA has become very constituency-driven, running many small projects which don't drive public support, or do anything visibly useful to the citizenry, which is why it's being cut. Choosing which navel-gazing experiment to fly to an expensive and obsolete space station seems very out-of-touch.
  - mrexroad 1y ago
    Bullshit. It’s always been a constituency-driven jobs program, but that doesn’t meant it still doesn’t do important work. Apollo was incredibly useful to the citizenry and it still wasn’t widely supported.
  - dotnet00 1y ago
    The guys doing the cutting are also the guys responsible for NASA having no other options but to try to keep the ISS going as long as possible with any science that can be performed on it. Some of them are probably old enough to have been screwing over NASA since the end of Apollo.
areoform 1y ago
I have had the privilege of having spent time with NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr Jim Green, and hearing him call me a friend. (In case you ever read this, thank you for everything Jim! You'll always be our space grandpa <3) The Office of the Chief Scientist does more than just weigh in. The Planetary Society had been trying for 25+ years to put a mic on Mars. We'd sent cameras to mars, but we'd never sent a mic. It was a combination of denials ("there's no real scientific purpose" was the pushback) and bad luck (the first mission in 1999 crashed so did another - more here, https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones ). Here's a Web 1.0 page from the 90's on it, https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/marsmic/whatisit.html https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/marsmic/whatisit.html We finally got a microphone on Mars in 2021 thanks (in part) to the Dr. Jim Green. At the time, he was the head of NASA's Planetary Science Division, and along with his colleagues, he put his weight behind the payload and helped get it past the bureaucracy. His push wasn't the only push. A LOT of people worked on it, but it was an important one. He is also the reason why NASA got into Planetary Defense. He also pushed for the NEO Observations Program. I remember talking to him about this a few years ago. IIRC, he pushed for the creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) to make an explicit Planetary Defense team within NASA. He also helped refocus NASA on the search for life on Mars. And as Chief Scientist, he started putting his weight behind terraforming Mars, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-mars.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-ma... Every large organisation, every bureaucracy needs someone like Jim to get interesting ideas across the finish line. Jim consistently did that across his career, and the office of Chief Scientist give him the ability to seriously advocate for "crazy stuff" (not his words) like Martian life and terraforming. His successor is much the same. I think this closure is a net loss for humanity.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Why a mic? Is the atmosphere thick enough for sound to travel? Or to hear vibrations in the surface?
  - dotnet00 1y ago
    Yep, it is enough to have sound: https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU IIRC we would've actually had audio to accompany video of the skycrane landing, but the mic had an issue at that time.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
History doesn't repeat but it rhymes isn't close enough to what's happening here. NASA had its mission statement changed in ~2005 by the Bush administration, to disregard/delete/chainsaw out the mission to observe & understand earth. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/science/nasas-goals-delete-mention-of-home-planet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/science/nasas-goals-delet... The foe against reality now is new and different. We should appreciate & respect how they stand against humanity in new ways, seek to bring ignorance & darkness down upon the world, let us hurt ourselves without attending to or working to improving Spaceship Earth. But this is also what "these people" do, and the ignorance to plunge us down into hell & ruin is something they have brought against mankind, reason & truth for decades. This is not new; this damnation & hell of ignorance and hands-over-the-eyes that these ruiners have been bringing against reality for decades. This is a long long history of people trying to destroy mankind's understanding.
spwa4 1y ago
Same happened at many of the FANG companies in the many firing rounds ...

78 points by ironyman 1y ago

> These goals are in line with the administration’s own stated priorities. Just weeks after shuttering OCS, the White House announced an executive order intended to, in its words, restore scientific integrity policies of federally funded research activities. I get that they are trying to highlight the administrations hypocrisy, but stronger wording would really be appropriate. That scientific integrity has always just been a fig leaf that should never be taken at face value, a red herring.

quantified 1y ago
Scientific integrity is a red herring?
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    What lies did NASA promote?
    - mrexroad 1y ago
      Moon landing, probably. /s I normally leave flippant remarks like this to Reddit, but this make-nasa-space-again b/c earth-science-is-lies narrative is so fucking stupid it deserves a stupid response.
    - MengerSponge 1y ago
      I never said NASA was lying? They didn't issue the EO.
- bigiain 1y ago
  The current administration's "scientific integrity" is a red herring. I good argument can be made for stronger wording than "red herring" too. I would suggest both "politically motivated lie", and "intentionally deceiving propaganda" are very close to the truth.
nickff 1y ago
[flagged]
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  (a) None of those are literary devices; they're all common vocabulary items that you'd expect an illiterate person to be familiar with. (b) If you are a nonnative speaker, what's the difference between looking up an unfamiliar idiom and an unfamiliar word? (c) Your pulled quote contains only two idioms. My best guess is that you're calling face value an idiom, but it is a transparent construction that means exactly what you'd expect if you knew the words face¹ and value.² ¹ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/face https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/face noun 5(a)(1) ² https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/value https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/value noun 1; 8
  - nickff 1y ago
    “Face value” is a reference to currency, postage stamps, bank-notes, and stock certificates, which have a value printed on their face, but which are not always actually worth that amount. I am a native speaker, but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_value
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      ...what is your comment supposed to be relevant to? You didn't refute any point. (a) These are all common vocabulary items; (b) If you are a native speaker who needs to look up a lot of words, what makes these different? ; (c) face value is not an idiom. It is compositional. What would you say if you saw a reference to someone as a "Svengali"? That is a literary allusion. It can't be an idiom because it's only one word long. Do you think it's an idiom anyway? In what sense? It's possible to understand face value as metaphorically referring to the face value of a coin, or as directly referring to the value that any given object or event appears or purports to have on its face, but in either case it won't be an idiom. > but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say This is just false. From a communications or a vocabulary perspective, there is no difference between "idioms" and "words".

gnerd00 1y ago

can someone closer to the action speak about actual issues in that office? As an outsider, it seems like there was some fishy news about the International Space Station, for example...

nickff 1y ago
Not an insider, but I think your comment gets to the core of the issue. One of the pictures used in the story has a Space Shuttle in it, and another has a Vehicle Assembly Building; neither of those have been used (for anything interesting to the public other than tours) for over a decade. NASA has become very constituency-driven, running many small projects which don't drive public support, or do anything visibly useful to the citizenry, which is why it's being cut. Choosing which navel-gazing experiment to fly to an expensive and obsolete space station seems very out-of-touch.
- mrexroad 1y ago
  Bullshit. It’s always been a constituency-driven jobs program, but that doesn’t meant it still doesn’t do important work. Apollo was incredibly useful to the citizenry and it still wasn’t widely supported.
- dotnet00 1y ago
  The guys doing the cutting are also the guys responsible for NASA having no other options but to try to keep the ISS going as long as possible with any science that can be performed on it. Some of them are probably old enough to have been screwing over NASA since the end of Apollo.

areoform 1y ago

I have had the privilege of having spent time with NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr Jim Green, and hearing him call me a friend. (In case you ever read this, thank you for everything Jim! You'll always be our space grandpa <3) The Office of the Chief Scientist does more than just weigh in. The Planetary Society had been trying for 25+ years to put a mic on Mars. We'd sent cameras to mars, but we'd never sent a mic. It was a combination of denials ("there's no real scientific purpose" was the pushback) and bad luck (the first mission in 1999 crashed so did another - more here, https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones ). Here's a Web 1.0 page from the 90's on it, https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/marsmic/whatisit.html https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/marsmic/whatisit.html We finally got a microphone on Mars in 2021 thanks (in part) to the Dr. Jim Green. At the time, he was the head of NASA's Planetary Science Division, and along with his colleagues, he put his weight behind the payload and helped get it past the bureaucracy. His push wasn't the only push. A LOT of people worked on it, but it was an important one. He is also the reason why NASA got into Planetary Defense. He also pushed for the NEO Observations Program. I remember talking to him about this a few years ago. IIRC, he pushed for the creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) to make an explicit Planetary Defense team within NASA. He also helped refocus NASA on the search for life on Mars. And as Chief Scientist, he started putting his weight behind terraforming Mars, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-mars.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-ma... Every large organisation, every bureaucracy needs someone like Jim to get interesting ideas across the finish line. Jim consistently did that across his career, and the office of Chief Scientist give him the ability to seriously advocate for "crazy stuff" (not his words) like Martian life and terraforming. His successor is much the same. I think this closure is a net loss for humanity.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
Why a mic? Is the atmosphere thick enough for sound to travel? Or to hear vibrations in the surface?
- dotnet00 1y ago
  Yep, it is enough to have sound: https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU https://youtu.be/GHenFGnixzU IIRC we would've actually had audio to accompany video of the skycrane landing, but the mic had an issue at that time.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

History doesn't repeat but it rhymes isn't close enough to what's happening here. NASA had its mission statement changed in ~2005 by the Bush administration, to disregard/delete/chainsaw out the mission to observe & understand earth. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/science/nasas-goals-delete-mention-of-home-planet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/science/nasas-goals-delet... The foe against reality now is new and different. We should appreciate & respect how they stand against humanity in new ways, seek to bring ignorance & darkness down upon the world, let us hurt ourselves without attending to or working to improving Spaceship Earth. But this is also what "these people" do, and the ignorance to plunge us down into hell & ruin is something they have brought against mankind, reason & truth for decades. This is not new; this damnation & hell of ignorance and hands-over-the-eyes that these ruiners have been bringing against reality for decades. This is a long long history of people trying to destroy mankind's understanding.

spwa4 1y ago

Same happened at many of the FANG companies in the many firing rounds ...