Another Good Idea Badly Promoted by JPL

To the Editor: You are boring. All you do is constantly complain about everything NASA does.

Editor's note: yet something compels you to come to this website ...

Transparency, I think JPL is smart to do this and the rest of the centers should do so also.

Hell Ares should do this when the time comes and combat all the critics with even more progress reports and access.

Why is President Obama taking so long to appoint his nominee for the nest NASA administrator....

Does it bode well or ill for NASA, Constellation and the VSE?

Yes, would have been nice for JPL to promote this more...but give the PAO people a break. The OCO failure is drawing all the media's attention today.

Editor's note: I am told that this event was planned for some time. Too bad NASA JPL cannot multitask, I guess.

Wait, you are not on Twitter! OMG! WTF! LOL.

Actually, I think this is a case of the younger PAO crowd doing things their way, while the older PAO crowd is, well, doing it their way.

Veronica McGregor just picked up an award for how she used Twitter for the Phoenix Mission. It was a great use of the technology that maybe the rest of the office should look into.

BTW dannyskarka on twitter

Editor's note: Huh? I have been using Twitter for several years.

"where Mars Science Laboratory is being prepared for launch"

Oh, wow. Like, I need to sign in on this to see this before they pack it up and send it to the Cape, right? Hey, MSL is years away from launch. I'll wait until the "Clean Room Cam' and Chat" makes it to the Discovery channel. Just what I need to see, real time "chat" from a clean room. Yawn. Double yawn.

Very sensible move, JPL PAO. Quite reasonable that only Twitter-addicts will be boggled by this opportunity to drop everything and embrace minutiae in real time, while everyone else has their life to get on with.

lol, Realist, I have to agree. Who has time for Twitter besides news aggregators, celebrities, and jobless people or people with indefinite idle time??

I enjoyed it. I got to have a live feed of the descent stage being separated from the rover itself, like it will do when it lands, but slower. Saw lots of flight hardware, asked my own questions to a lead engineer and scientist - and they were answered. Not for everyone, certainly for the space enthusiast rather than the general public, but an interesting and exciting evenings viewing. I only wish I could have hung around to the end - but real life got in the way. I will catch up with the recording on uStream later.

If you're going to take the 'Who has time to...' stance - then why not apply it to, say, 24/7 shuttle coverage during flights on Nasa TV, or B-Roll of a spacecraft being driven at 1 mph to a launch complex. It might not be for you, but that doesn't mean it's not for anybody and it certainly doesn't make it a bad idea.

It would have been nice to see more people viewing, but it's early days with this sort of idea. I'm sure a more verbose announcement process will occur once they iron out the bugs and get better at doing these things.

Editor's note: gee, Doug, I am sure happy that foreign nationals such as yourself enjoyed the USTREAM event for MSL. Alas, we have 300 million people here in the States who actually pay for this hardware - a significant portion of whom would certainly derive benefit from seeing and learning about things like this - if only JPL PAO would take the time to tell them in advance such that they can participate. Like I said good idea, bad implementation.

Doug, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I respect the fact that some people would have enjoyed it, and that it's not for everyone. But what this posting was about was scolding JPL PAO for not informing the "rest of the world" about what it is doing. Comparison to 24/7 shuttle coverage is completely off base. I don't watch the shuttle being prepared in a hangar years before launch. Certainly, real-time has no attraction at all there. I watch it when it's actually going somewhere. And cool animations sure don't require press releases and media advisories, do they? Put them online so people can watch them anytime at the MSL website. (Perhaps they are already there.)

Not to detract from the excellent work that the MSL scientists and engineers are doing, but the whole premise of this is that the public needs to get involved in space efforts, and that involvement is measured by virtual presence, and that the value that those who "pay for this hardware" get is to look over the shoulder of an engineer in a bunny suit in real-time. Sorry, but I think the value goes far, far beyond that.

There are more important things for press releases and media advisories.

http://i39.tinypic.com/24w7ed0.jpg

Enjoy :)