Only NASA Could Make Space Exploration Boring

Good points Keith. But even the basics are being ignored: the images from the STS-126 fly-around of ISS are nowhere to be found on NASA websites. My goodness - you would think that someone in PAO could take the trouble over a holiday weekend when Americans have the time to browse the Internet to post what should be some inspiring ESC and video of the rejuvinated ISS. And aside from a paltry number of clips, there is none of that great HD on the NASA websites.

As a NASA contractor who manages some of the mission web sites, I'm constantly making this argument. Showing the public where their money is going and giving them the tools to participate or even contribute goes a long way towards proving their worth, which could help a floundering agency regain their footing and retain their funding.

OMG!!!!! Keith, I actually have the joyous occasion to actually agree with you!!!!!! They really do ignore the Joe Six Pack...with all the film they have I should not have to send $$$ on stuff from spaceflight films....there should be a library of all the film and downlinks from all the missions online...

They could easily take an excellent lesson from Elon Musk and his SpaceX operation. When the third Falcon launch had a failure in the stage separation, he was on the line almost immediately saying what went wrong, that they screwed up, showed movies of that event, and said that they would fix it for the next flight. They did and the fourth flight went off flawlessly.

NASA just can't handle mistakes, particularly their own. After all, NASA is perfect and nothing can go wrong, can go wrong, can go wrong, . . . . !

Actually the downlinked HD has centered almost exclusively on rather boring activities onboard ISS and 'PAO' interviews. On this, the first mission with extended capability for live HD downlink from both ISS and Endeavour, there has been almost no effort to point the camera out the window and show HD shots of Earth, the EVA activities, an HD tour of the shuttle, etc. etc. Truly abysmal given the rarity of such opportunities now and in the future.

I think SOMEONE is reading Nasawatch, Keith: in my posted note to the earlier listing I mentioned that on the NASA gallery pages the current STS mission wasn't at the top of the scroll list and required a surfer to scroll down to find it, just to look at the downlinked pictures from the mission.

This has been fixed such that STS 126 is at the top of all the lists. Thank you, to whomever fixed that.

It is erroneous to report that dozens of HiDef cameras are sending video to Earth 24/7. The ISS uses TDRSS to downlink voice, video, and telemetry data. TDRSS lacks the bandwidth to downlink HiDef without removing at least some voice and telemetry data required for normal operations. In fact, the normal 4 channel video downlink from ISS is undersampled relative to normal NTSC so that it fits into available bandwidth.

Editor's note: I never said "dozens".

Most of us in the ISS program decry the lack of publicity regarding the program that many of us have devoted the last ten years of our lives to. I just mark it off to the JSC and their contractor focus on the Shuttle and bias against publicizing the station.

IMO, everyone in the United States should be familiar with the inside and outside of the station and people floating. If anything it should come from boring repetition, much like everyone knows the indian in the test pattern. A survey would probably show more people familiar with the astronaut running on the Skylab Treadmill or the stewardess in the 2001 Pan Am clipper than any location inside the space station. I'm not advocating unrestricted camera feed; the Peggy Whitson story demonstrates candid video can be the object of unintended attention, but it would have made a good viral video. There should be time set aside and more hours delivered. Here in Houston we have the NASA channel running 24/7 on the cable, perhaps other areas do also.

The PAO brains should be looking for opportunities to make viral video on Youtube - NASA bloopers or Astronauts Gone Wild perhaps.

People are interested.

Keith, you hit the nail on the head-the public's interest in NASA will rapidly decline over the next years, and accelerate during the gap-if the gap does indeed occur. You know, it's an interesting thing-when you talk with other federal agencies and their contractor communities, the almost universal opinion of NASA PAO is that it ranks among the worse in the federal service. Why is that? Arrogance, and a sense of wanting to avoid the great unwashed public that they are supposed to be working for. It seems many of our friends at NASA look down on the public as some form of inconvenience. Sometimes I wonder if we deserve a space program at all.

Perhaps the ISS has things we are not meant to see?

I think that a 'NASA TV-Live' channel might be a good idea, with continual live streaming coverage of the mission (primarily video from a relevant camera and the vehicle-mission control audio). Additionally, NASA.gov must, must, MUST put up more flight videos and faster. They also have a fairly non-user-friendly video list on their site, something which needs to be rectified as a matter of urgency.

At the very least, when there isn't a current major mission 'event' underway, they should switch NASA TV-Live to an 'earth-cam' showing the current view 'below' the vehicle. I know from experience (watching it on NASA TV, not directly unfortunately) that this view is never boring.

Many good points here that I won't argue. But as someone who covered the mission on a NASA website, I can clarify one thing. The photos of the undocking and flyaround -- which we do post for every shuttle mission -- were never downlinked from the station this time.

Believe me, folks at both HQ and JSC were looking for the photos (yes, even during a holiday weekend), but we can't post what we don't have. There is video posted of the flyaround.

There is certainly room for improvement, but people should be careful before assuming every perceived failing is a result of laziness or ineptitude. Sometimes it's just a question of having the material or the resources at hand.

Mars Phoenix Twitter page did more to boost my interest in space exploration than any TV broadcast. Simple, easily accessible information puts a great face on huge projects like that. I whole-heartedly agree with more publicity.

Has there been an analysis of how far the tool bag actually has strayed from the ISS? Depending on what direction the tool bag went when the astronaut released it, it may have stuck around in the near-ISS region for quite some time due to the constraints of orbital mechanics (and limited by differential air drag, probably).

It would be a sort of "inverse rendezvous" problem, where the tool bag would circle back to the near-ISS region once or twice an orbit for several (many?) orbits, depending upon how much along-track delta-V it was given.

One could then play a, "where's the tool bag?" game with any external ISS camera feeds that were available, and provide an example of how things are different up there to the general, but interested, public.

Page two of the ABC article claims the Flight Day 14 execute package has imagined sarcastic crew comments during PAO events. However, in the online FD14 package at http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/294193main_ep_fd14.pdf, there is nothing like what's in their story. Were the comments left out of the package given to the public, or did ABC make the comments up?