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I admire Mr. Hale's honesty and thorough examination of what went wrong. But something he said really bothered me. At the press conference where they discussed the foam situation, he called it "unsatisfactory" and then in hindsight, calls it "A pretty bland word for the way I really felt." THAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH NASA! In any other situation, when faced with such a dangerous close call, there would have been emotion and strong language used. But in NASAworld, that's all considered verboten. As Mr. Hale points out in his post, these people were his friends. He knew their families well. They weren't just employees. They dodged a bullet, and all he could call it was "unsatisfactory." I'm not asking NASA to be full of raving loons. But show some goddamn emotion from time to time! One of the most wonderful things about Curiosity was not just the amazing landing, but the sheer jubilation the JPL team went through once they realized their little rover had safely survived the "7 minutes of terror" and landed. For 10 minutes, they hugged, shouted, and cheered. For crying out loud, the flight director had a mohawk! I have no doubt that by showing themselves as fully human, these amazing people just created a whole new generation of kids who will dream of sending probes to faraway places like Europa, Titan, and beyond. Bottom line: I admire Mr. Hale's honesty in hindsight. But his bland non-emotionalism is one of the reasons people just don't care about space anymore. Make it exciting and demonstrate emotion, and people will care. Act all Spock-like 100% of the time and people will think you DON'T care (so why should they?) |