Why would they owe you such detailed explanations? You're asking for a full-on incident report. These take days to write and there's no reason for the public at large to need it.
> there's no reason for the public at large to need it
As a member of said public, I would be curious to know. There's no need for taxpayer-funded agencies to operate in a cloak of darkness.
Most everything done by government should by default be open to the public, with an exceedingly high bar that must be met to be otherwise. Otherwise, you run into nonsensical things like how some details around the assassination of a president 60 years ago are still classified on "national security" grounds.
which of these is 'operating in a cloak of darkness':
- NASA informs the public immediately, and then makes the details available later after they've had time to compile the news and information into a format useful for the public
- NASA waits to inform the public until said report is finished
or perhaps you're after option c:
- NASA's network drives are open to the www in read-only mode, because, you know, 'open by default' entails realtime information (even though he doesn't actually care 99.9999% of the time. yet, someone should deliver this functionality, without it costing the taxpayer extra).
NASA routinely makes a LOT of data open to the public. Like, you can get very detailed JWST data directly from NASA. Probably far more detailed than you'd ever care to, because NASA does care about exactly your concern.
Actually, many agencies publish very detailed data if you care to look.
I'm not here demanding an immediate report, but it is a publicly-funded agency with a goal of furthering the world's scientific understanding... and a detailed public writeup is not exactly a huge lift compared to all the other things they accomplish.
I'm also the sort of person who thinks that all code written with public money should be open source.
It's always a good thing for technical information about incidents like this to be made accessible to the public. NASA is a publicly funded organization and as such they do have a responsibility towards us.
Of course there are operational details that we don't need to be made aware of, but for an incident as big as this there's no reason to at least know how it happened and what could be changed to prevent it from happening again.
I guess you and I are being downvoted because people on HN can’t tolerate engineers being questioned. Hey guys, everyone makes mistakes and it’s an important part of scientific advancement to understand and share that knowledge.
It takes time and effort to prepare such a document for public release. Government agencies produce all kinds of reports which are of minimal interest to the public. Making the documents available on demand via FOIA is a reasonable way to ensure that time and money isn't wasted.
Normally this makes sense, because you're asking why money was wasted. But, in this case if it's permanently bricked you will actually save money, because if Voyager 2 is bricked the team working on it is now redundant. It's not like they had an incentive to be incompetent and waste money - very much the opposite.
Because I’m an annoyingly precocious child of thirteen and this is how you capture my interest and enable my future glittering career in deep space telemetry engineering.
The context is a discussion of what explanations NASA owes in a brief public statement. Saying he'd like to know does not clearly denote that he is changing the parameters of the conversation to talk about something else.
Jesus, I bet you're also one of those people that are fine with mass surveillance because it's ok because your have nothing to hide. It's people like you who set the bar so low that we can't have nice things. Sheesh
gottorf|2 years ago
> there's no reason for the public at large to need it
As a member of said public, I would be curious to know. There's no need for taxpayer-funded agencies to operate in a cloak of darkness.
Most everything done by government should by default be open to the public, with an exceedingly high bar that must be met to be otherwise. Otherwise, you run into nonsensical things like how some details around the assassination of a president 60 years ago are still classified on "national security" grounds.
MAGZine|2 years ago
- NASA informs the public immediately, and then makes the details available later after they've had time to compile the news and information into a format useful for the public
- NASA waits to inform the public until said report is finished
or perhaps you're after option c:
- NASA's network drives are open to the www in read-only mode, because, you know, 'open by default' entails realtime information (even though he doesn't actually care 99.9999% of the time. yet, someone should deliver this functionality, without it costing the taxpayer extra).
NASA routinely makes a LOT of data open to the public. Like, you can get very detailed JWST data directly from NASA. Probably far more detailed than you'd ever care to, because NASA does care about exactly your concern.
Actually, many agencies publish very detailed data if you care to look.
djur|2 years ago
This is what the Freedom of Information Act is for:
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/FOIA/request.html
The report may not exist yet, so you may need to wait.
kdmccormick|2 years ago
I'm also the sort of person who thinks that all code written with public money should be open source.
dada78641|2 years ago
Of course there are operational details that we don't need to be made aware of, but for an incident as big as this there's no reason to at least know how it happened and what could be changed to prevent it from happening again.
ZiiS|2 years ago
josefx|2 years ago
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djur|2 years ago
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flangola7|2 years ago
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iLoveOncall|2 years ago
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thefurdrake|2 years ago
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