4 ms·

Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transpare

• kccqzy 10mo ago
  People in general expect privacy when it comes to medical issues.
• whateverboat 10mo ago
  May be it would be better to have a full diagnosis after splashdown?
• daeken 10mo ago
  The astronaut in question may choose to disclose that they had the medical emergency and possibly its nature, but it seems wholly reasonable to not single them out (when it affects the whole mission) or disclose their medical status.
  • okdood64 10mo ago
    Disagree; this is completely taxpayer funded and we deserve to know every detail relevant to mission status. In this scenario knowing what illness and why it's grounds for a return is very relevant. That said, I can see NASA delaying information release to figure out a good strategy for it while still respecting any wishes of the sick astronaut with regards to disclosure.
    • pockybum522 10mo ago
      What a strange take. Does this also apply to every soldier in the armed forces? Seems your criteria is equally applicable there. The relevant people that can do the research and write future policies based on the data obviously will have the information. Not sure what good you think that you personally having it can do.
      • okdood64 10mo ago
        A single soldier having a medical issue generally doesn't cancel a multi-month mission costing some X large sum of money, requiring another Y large sum of money to even finish cancelling it (returning their unit home). Therefore it's not relevant and not needed for the public to know.
        • therealpygon 10mo ago
          Yes, I’m sure aircrew never get so violently sick as to affect millions or billions of dollars in crew and and supporting assets due to an emergency, and armed service members are never transported by emergency transportations for eye-watering costs. Technical inequity that ignores facts is the argument of those without arguments. The specifics of “who” has zero relevance to what is necessary for an ongoing situation; you don’t get to dictate your access and timeline to information just because you contributed a fraction of a penny to something.
          • NetMageSCW 9mo ago
            The amount of money involved should have nothing to do with privacy. You don’t get to violate people’s rights just because it was expensive.
        • alistairSH 10mo ago
          It could for anything remotely “special ops” - those are small specialized teams.
        • RyanCavanaugh 10mo ago
          What are you going to do with this information? What policy would you plausibly advocate for on the basis of it?
      • Supermancho 10mo ago
        > What a strange take. Does this also apply to every soldier in the armed forces? Seems your criteria is equally applicable there. Why? There are different rules for different endeavors, specializations, and roles. NASA is ostensibly for exploration, in an expansive sense. Hiding information of any kind, seems antithetical to the over-arching mission. > The relevant people that can do the research and write future policies based on the data obviously will have the information. Given recent events, this assumption of fidelity is not something I can subscribe to, for the rest of my days.
    • awestroke 10mo ago
      The CIA is also taxpayer funded. Do you have similar expectations of transparency into their missions?
      • okdood64 10mo ago
        I can respect operational security requirements. Even though they are abused.
    • hermannj314 10mo ago
      The school is tax-payer funded, but I don't get to know why every teacher called out sick. Government employees, contractors, etc. don't owe your curiousity satiety. We are buying their service, not their soul.
    • poulpy123 10mo ago
      When you drive on a taxpayer funded road, should you disclose publicly your medical history? When the taxpayer funded US military kidnap a foreign president on your name, should you disclose publicly your medical history ? When you use the taxpayer funded GPS etc...
    • patmorgan23 10mo ago
      Does your employer get to know every little detail of your medical conditions when you call in sick? After all they're funding it.
  • mapmeld 10mo ago
    Especially since every movement up and down from space is expensive and risks the life of the crew, it'd be a bad idea for NASA to name the astronaut ahead of time.
• xingped 10mo ago
  Yes, but at the same time I think NASA has long earned the trust to decide these things. Regardless of the issue, nobody wants their health issues aired to the entire world. I am personally okay just not knowing the intimate details.
• candl 10mo ago
  The only medical condition I can think of which they would not disclose is pregnancy. That would lead to further questions and is controversial despite being very simple. Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public.
  • kyleee 10mo ago
    [flagged]
  • NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
    > Further evidenced by the fact that the affected crew member is unknown to the public. Nope. On a previous mission one of the crew members had to sped a night in hospital after touchdown. They never said who, or what for. This is standard procedure, and for good reason.
  • qgin 10mo ago
    That alone is enough reason to have a policy of never disclosing medical conditions.
• bryant 10mo ago
  > Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency. We deserve as much transparency as we can get on the science we as taxpayers paid for, not full de-anonymization of the bodily happenings of living crew. There's certainly valuable science here, but the crew member doesn't have to be outed for it. > You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy. I don't think this is a healthy mindset, and there's a heck of a slippery slope with this argument. Would we apply this to companies receiving federal grants too? Contractors? Universities? Schools? That's a lot of people who'll lose medical privacy for something probably unrelated to their job, and there'll be a much smaller applicant pool for the jobs themselves if applicants are aware that their own internal issues might be disclosed when the public clamors for it. > We might want to learn from what went wrong here. Agree, NASA certainly will, and new science and engineering will come of it that we benefit from. But that doesn't have to involve breaching medical privacy and ethics.
  • ryanmcgarvey 10mo ago
    The full on dystopian take would be to require anyone receiving welfare or other public funds to fully disclose all of their private details. You want Medicaid? Tell everyone about your hemorrhoids first.
    • kyleee 10mo ago
      Might actually be a net benefit and lead to de-stigmatizing human health conditions
      • Aurornis 10mo ago
        You go first, then. Let’s see your full medical records without redaction if you think it’s a net benefit. I think there's value in reducing stigma around health conditions, but forcing poor people to reveal their medical conditions to the world isn't it.
        • 10mo ago
• ssl-3 10mo ago
  These are free people (who happen to have a job that involves a space program). They have the same rights to [try to] keep their medical concerns private as you and I do. It does cost a lot of money to keep their jobs going, but: They're not slaves. We do not own these people.
• perihelions 10mo ago
  Without taking a side, I'll share the interesting detail that NASA did not historically grant much medical privacy to astronauts. You can read medical reports of the Apollo-Soyuz crew here (documenting their poisoning by toxic rocket fuel, dinitrogen tetroxide), https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770023791 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770023791 ("The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: Medical report" (1977))
  • bryant 10mo ago
    Since this is a special publication and since it was published in 1977 (after the Privacy Act of 1974), I'm wondering if NASA's condition for astronauts on this mission was to release mission-related medical science to the public. Speculating: If this is a condition of employment as an astronaut, then it probably wouldn't include conditions confirmed not to be caused by being in space, which means this'll stay confidential until NASA has fully diagnosed the crew member and figured out what likely happened. And if it turns out the crew member's issue was entirely unrelated to the mission, it stays under wraps but new science or procedures are devised to better manage this and related conditions in space.
• Merad 10mo ago
  Do you seriously believe that you should have the right to demand access to the private medical records of every teacher, soldier, judge, cop, etc. in the country because their pay comes from taxpayers? If yes I'm not quite sure how to respond, IMO that's an utterly absurd position. If no, why are astronauts being singled out for this treatment?
• kahrl 10mo ago
  Perhaps you should chill and wait until they land before you start with your ridiculous paranoid thinking and entitlement?
• Aurornis 10mo ago
  What difference would this make to you? It would unnecessarily violate someone’s medical privacy for no actual benefit to the public other than satisfying someone’s curiosity. > You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy. Yes, everyone gets privacy. You don’t get to see their private communications back home. You don’t get their medical records. They aren’t receiving money from taxpayers like a gift. They’re doing a job. It’s ridiculous to demand that they forfeit their privacy because tax money was involved. > We might want to learn from what went wrong here. NASA will learn what went wrong here because they’re in a position to act on You are not in a position to do anything about it. Violating their privacy would make no difference.
• nkrisc 10mo ago
  I think it’s possible to be sufficiently transparent while simultaneously keeping someone’s personal health status private. As a hypothetical example, it’s possible to disclose if this health issue was known before they were selected for the mission, and if it was, what processes were in place to determine if they should or should not go, etc, all without revealing personal health information.
• mcny 10mo ago
  When I say I want full transparency, I usually am talking about how much pay they received and in the case of elected representatives, their net worth at least once a year. I wouldn't ask for a full health report to be made public by law. Maybe a summary for elected officials.
  • rtp4me 10mo ago
    Why do you need to know how much they are paid and their net worth? What difference does it make to you? Public official pay is already available online. A quick google search will tell you how much congress people get paid, and the DoD pay scale is available online as well.
    • jjk166 10mo ago
      > Public official pay is already available online. A quick google search will tell you how much congress people get paid, and the DoD pay scale is available online as well. That is the transparency in action.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• mvkel 10mo ago
  Demanding every intimate personal detail of a human whose paycheck you happen to underwrite feels a little ... inhumane.
• Kreutzer 10mo ago
  You know that golden ballroom Trump has been constructing with your tax dollars isn’t going to be for the public either…
• jjk166 10mo ago
  What possible use is it to the taxpayer to know who was affected by what health condition? NASA knows who the person is, if there is any lesson to be learned this policy isn't stopping them. What lesson do you, random citizen, expect to learn? What would you do differently if you had access to this information? If it is policy to overshare medical details, that might lead astronauts to delay or refuse to give medical information that does matter to the mission. Before we talk at all of medical ethics, on purely pragmatic grounds this information ought to be confidential.
• poulpy123 10mo ago
  I don't think taxes being used can justify a breach of medical confidentiality
• patmorgan23 10mo ago
  > We might want to learn from what went wrong here. I'm sure NASA is keeping good records and will take lessons learned from this situation, but they can do that without blasting someone's private medical information out publicly.