What “marketing exercise” are you referring to? If you mean the NASA public affairs “triangle” that got so much negative commentary on space websites, NASA science actually was not highlighted in that diagram or presentation.

“it is not the science that is NASA’s strong suit”

Science is the one thing that NASA consistently does well. NASA’s science spacecraft are responsible for an outsized number of annual discoveries, their achievements get a lot of recognition from the public, and they’ve been rewarded for it budgetarily. See the long list of “FACT”s in a couple of my earlier posts about a third of the way up this thread.

“One of the free handouts I try to have available when I do outreach is “Spinoff” magazine, which also comes as a CD. People gobble them up. They’re fascinated by the stories of how NASA needs drove the kinds of developments that we benefit from today.”

There’s no doubt that technology spinoff stories are good for public relations.

But the difficulty comes when these backwards-looking stories are used as an argument for funding going forward. While a spinoff argument may generally support funding for government R&D entities like NASA, they do not support any particular level of funding for these entities. For example, if we say we want to send Instrument X or Astronaut Y to Planet Z, we can design a mission to do so and price it out (plus or minus some margin of error). But if we want to optimize or maximize technology spinoffs (or just have lots of spinoffs), there’s no way to know what the right level of future funding is. Is it $5 billion, $50 billion, or $500 billion?

In fact, one could argue that if we retained NASA’s technology dollars but zeroed out the funding for actual space missions from NASA’s budget, we would still get most of the same spinoffs at much reduced cost to the taxpayer.

And this is where the logic of the spinoff argument breaks down. If we just want the Earth-related technology benefits of NASA’s programs, then we should just spend taxpayer dollars on R&D programs designed to create those benefits. If we want stronger materials or new instruments, two of the most common NASA spinoffs for example, there’s no need to build big honkin rockets and spacecraft to blast people, robots, and observatories into space. We can just pursue multi-million dollars programs in stronger materials and new instruments and forgo the multi-billion dollar programs in astronauts, rockets, and spacecraft.

I’m not saying that’s what we should do with our nation’s civil space program. But if we rely too heavily on the spinoff argument to justify NASA’s spending levels, the argument leads us to a much smaller space program that wouldn’t actually put much into space.

FWIW…

One of the free handouts I try to have available when I do outreach is “Spinoff” magazine, which also comes as a CD. People gobble them up. They’re fascinated by the stories of how NASA needs drove the kinds of developments that we benefit from today. They’re intrigued by some of the potential technology identified by materials and microgravity scientists for space development. One of the titles in the Lunar Library that gets regular traffic is the Scientific American book on “Inventions from Space”. People want to see technology because they know it leads to good jobs that someone’s kids are going to do.

I do think it is a good thing that more mainstream press is writing more about the topic of space, and the up-and-coming private sector efforts. Perhaps they’re starting to realize that this really is an area of economic opportunity for the U.S. once unleashed into the private sector marketplace. Jobs, maybe?

If NASA “turns” to science for some good PR, then maybe they ought to quit gutting it to pay for a decrepit shuttle and corrupt astronauts.

“…The U.S. space agency is already weathering a veritable meteor shower of problems, including allegations of corruption, underfunding, drunken and disturbed astronauts, and even murder.

“Can anything be done to turn things around?

“NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs says the solution is to emphasize the agency’s strong suit–science.

‘It’s easy to fall into the headline-grabbing issues that have faced the agency in recent months, but there are so many more positive issues for the American people to focus on,’ he says. NASA has two rovers on Mars and another vehicle scheduled to land on the planet in the coming months, and it also plans to send an unmanned mission to study Pluto by 2015, Jacobs points out.”

Again, with the human space flight program having so little to sell except negative stories about Shuttle performance and astronaut misbehavior, what does the cornered NASA spokesperson turn for some good news stories? To positive achievements in space science.

To first order, the problem with VSE visibility, at least the big human space flight elements, is not marketing. The problem is that the human space flight program has nothing worth marketing.

Full article at http://www.forbes.com/business/2007/08/14/nasa-shuttle-space-biz-wash-cx_bw_0814nasa.html.

FWIW…

Government welfare programs have been an American tradition for over eight decades. Was that what you had in mind?

I’m be interested in subscriber numbers of these magazines. if is less then 30% of the voting public then does it really matter?

The argument is yours to doubt, but the correlation exists.

In the posts above, I threw out about 20-odd facts and figures backed up with links to articles and studies showing that significant achievements by NASA’s space science programs in the 1994-2005 timeframe have garnered tens of millions of unique website visitors, billions of hits, and thousands of other media impressions. The posts above also have links showing that during that same timeframe, NASA’s space science budget doubled from a projected low of $1.5 billion dollars per year to a projected high $3.0 billion dollars per year (and that understates the actual budget gain). In short, the figures show that strong NASA space science achievements led to strong public interest in NASA’s space science missions, which in turn led to strong budget support for NASA’s space science programs.

Our system of government doesn’t always work this well. I’d argue that NASA’s human space flight programs have languished for decades on large parochial spending despite having practically no exploration achievements to speak of in the same timeframe.

But NASA’s space science program shows that positive achievements generate positive news, both of which can and do get rewarded in the federal budget process.

“Nasa has to compete with many mouths feeding from the public trough. Some good and worthy mouths, some not.”

I’m not sure what this has to do with the argument. It’s certainly no different with the military. Inter- (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) and intra-service (operations versus R&D, different R&D programs) rivalries, not to mention parochial foodfights over military bases, exist in spades at DOD, too.

“The idea that researching web hits can give legitimacy to Nasa programs and help build a case for the VSE is a bad one.”

I never argued that “researching web hits” gives “legitimacy” to anything.

I argued that tens of million of unique visitors, billions of web hits, and thousands of media impressions for NASA’s space science missions are reflective of the public’s interest in actual exploration achievements and that this has been demonstrably rewarded in the budget for NASA’s space science program.

I’m not saying that we should “research web hits” to demonstrate how many people are actually interested in the VSE and somehow give it “legitimacy”.

What I am saying is that if the human space flight goals in the VSE are to gain interest from and “legitimacy” with the public over the long-run, then NASA’s space science programs offer a good model for how it’s done, i.e., innovative programs that actually and regularly push back frontiers in exploration, science, and technology in demonstrably new ways.

“Nasa has to find a resonance, like the military has, to broad segments of society if it wants to go down the VSE road.”

Again, based on the data in the earlier posts, I’d argue that NASA’s space science programs already have “resonance” with the public (there wouldn’t be such a high level of interest, otherwise) and have been rewarded for it budgetarily.

And I don’t mean this as a personal attack, but I find the argument that spending on our military has some “resonance” with American values to be rather goofy.

First, we’re not a military state. Our values don’t lie with the military. Rather, the military defends our values.

Second, military spending is not driven by “broad segments of society” but by real and perceived threats. Just look at patterns of military spending during the Cold War, in the post-Cold War period, and in the post-9/11 period. It was up, then down, then up again, all in correlation to the rise and fall of the communist Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of radical Islam. Military spending arguably has more to do with the values of other nations than our own.

“The reason the military can get an F-22, as opposed to continued F-15’s or get B-2 rather than more B-52’s is because the military is reflective of the values of broad segments of the population.”

Again, I don’t mean this as a personal attack, but this argument is rather goofy. An F-22 is or B-2 is not reflective of the values of “broad segments of the population”. They’re just weapons that, given assessments of various threats around the world and the various options for meeting those threats, that our military, White House, and Congress (rightly or wrongly) has decided to pursue. The decisions behind the F-22 and B-2 had to do with defeating air defense systems through combinations of stealth and speed, not American values.

Maybe you could make an argument that, like NASA space science, the military has done a good job defending American borders (only two attacks on American soil over the past century) and gets rewarded appropriately in the budget process.

Maybe you could also make an argument that, like NASA’s human space flight programs, the F-22 or B-2 bring home the bacon for certain congressional districts and those programs get rewarded appropriately in the budget process.

But neither of those arguments is about the military resonating with “broad segments of the population”. They’re about program performance and pork, not the values of our society.

“That is what keeps us from being like Canada, Germany, Italy, and many other countries that spend paltry sums on defense.”

No, it’s the divergent history of these nations and the threats against them that drives their military spending.

The U.S. won both WWII and the Cold War, which left us standing as the only world superpower and the military obligations that come with it. We also suffered the (so far) worst attack by radical Islam against the western world, which started the war on terror and a new round of military spending.

Germany, however, was on the losing side of WWII, never regained superpower status, and has no significant threats with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the country’s spending priorities are just still consumed by the integration of the former East Germany. A similar story exists for Italy.

Canada was never on the losing side of anything, but never achieved superpower status like the U.S. and has even fewer threats than the other nations discussed due to its location and low, peacekeeping profile.

“Constitution or not, the US has chosen to spend large sums to engineer and research the best military equipment.”

Yes. But, it has little to do with our values, and everything to do with our status in the world and the real and perceived threats to our way of life.

“Nasa should be attempting to find its own vein of enduring support and build on it, much like the military has done. I can think of many ways to do that,”

Again, outside recruitment advertisements and Congressional pork-barrel politicking, I don’t see any past or present effort by the military to find “its own vein of enduring support”.

But if you have “ways” for NASA “to do that”, then please, offer them up for critique.

“but please spare me the marketing notions of web hits, unique MAC addresses, magazine subscriptions and the like.”

I apologize that I did not spare you that. But I take a little umbrage with the term “marketing notions”. As I said several times in the earlier posts, it’s not a matter of good or bad “marketing”. It a matter of whether NASA programs have a product — in terms of achievements that actual rolling back exploration frontiers physically, scientifically, or technologically — that is worth “marketing”. NASA’s space science program historically have had such products and have been rewarded with doubling budgets in recent years for it. NASA human space flight programs have not such products for decades, and that is probably a bigger reason for why human space flight budgets have not experienced such growth and why the VSE’s human space flight objectives (finish ISS, retire the STS, return to the Moon) remain relatively unknown to the public.

My 2 cents… FWIW.