NASA Silliness
Yesterday, July 4 2006, NASA managed to get the space shuttle launched after years of fretting over foam insulation. Congratulations!
Today I get an email message from NASA saying that we'll no longer be getting email alerts about shuttle and space station overpasses. NASA's drunk again.
NASA wants itself to look good in the eyes of the American public and in the eyes of the world. We want it to look good too. But we, the people who pay for it, want it to look good because it is doing the right thing and doing it well. We do not expect it to look good solely because of marketing spin. We especially don't want it to look stupid because of goofy attempts at bad marketing spin.
NASA knows that years of fretting over foam does not make it look good. Especially so when the rest of the world is waiting for it to fulfill it's promises to haul stuff to the International Space Station ("ISS"). Especially so when NASA was being such a bully to everyone else about "where's your ISS stuff, man?" OK, ok; so NASA wants to look "good" and smart and efficient and capable. That's a good idea. They should do that.
But don't over do your focus on "looking good" NASA. When you do that, you end up doing things like moving the notifications for shuttle & ISS overflights to the public relations focused website instead of just copying the information there. And then you send out a notice that you're "consolidating" by splitting coherent services apart. Ummm... no.
Here's what you (NASA) said: "In order to provide the most up-to-date, to-the-minute information in a single location, NASA has consolidated Space Station and Shuttle tracking on the Human Space Flight Web site."
That's silly. The information already was in "a single location" and, actually, up-to-the-tenth of a minute or better at the NASA "JPass" website at science.nasa.gov. In reality NASA, you have done the opposite of your stated intentions. You've split the information into two separate locations, possibly made it somewhat less accurate and have certainly made it less convenient and helpful.
So it's actually beyond silly. It's wasteful of your time and effort. It's inconsiderate of us, your paying constituency, and, really it's just plain stupid.
Or, worse, it's you thinking that we are stupid or gullible -- or both stupid and gullible. Which makes you seem even more wasteful and arrogant and unfocused about the task that we've given you.
So here's the deal NASA: if you want to have the overflight information on the showier websites, by all means do so. The more you distribute the information that we pay for, the better! But don't do silly things like take it away from one public access point just to inconveniently promote another access point. And especially don't do stupid things like trying to rationalize the silly bits with blather that is patently incorrect, impolite, inconsiderate and ... just dumb.
Get off the silly juice NASA and get back to work!
By the way; I sent you a fix for the foam problem. In a suggestion form on the flashier website.
