Things are still hectic here preparing the house for the party after the communion, but for those who hadn’t seen it, NASA Space Flight has finally acquired the heretofore hidden appendices to the ESAS report that supposedly justify their selection (i.e., the work that I asked Mike to show us). Jon Goff has a sneak preview. Clark Lindsey has more thoughts. More thoughts from me will have to await my return to Florida tomorrow.
15 thoughts on “Break From Blogging Break”
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If these documents are available on a pay per view site, they should be released to the public, especially if the charges made have any merit.
Dennis,
Several years ago — yes, years — Ross Tierney filed a FOIA request to compel NASA to release these appendices. Years passed with no response from NASA. Not even a denial.
These are said to be the same documents, with one of the appendices omitted as it si said to contain proprietary information concerning cost calculations.
How did Chris Bergin get them? I don’t know but he did and I have no objection with NSF running with this for a while until NASA finally decides to publish these documents themselves.
Jon Goff is exactly right — these documents are well worth the modest cost of an L2 subscription at Nasaspaceflight.
However NASA really should publish these documents themselves — so we can all look under the hood — like Lori Garver wanted to do.
It really chaps my a$$ that I am required to subscribe to a website to view documents, videos etc. that were created with my tax money.
Remember to be mad at the right party–NASA. Chris was only able to get this info because he had the subscription section. It isn’t his fault that he got a scoop. It’s NASA’s for trying to hide the stuff for all this time.
~Jon
I concur with Jon Goff
And third. The real scandal is that until now you couldn’t even get these documents by subscribing to a website.
Remember to be mad at the right party–NASA. Chris was only able to get this info because he had the subscription section. It isn’t his fault that he got a scoop. It’s NASA’s for trying to hide the stuff for all this time.
This makes it worse Jon, not better. He was ONLY able to get the information because it was a pay per view site? That means that NASA personnel are complicit with assisting the commercial success of a website with taxpayer purchased documents.
As a matter of fact I have one of the other appendices from another section that was not released to the public. I have it because I had a contract from the agency working on the Lunar Architecture Team. This document was furnished on the understanding that it is not for public distribution until the agency releases it. I would not think of violating my contract terms to release this data.
Surely a FOIA Act request could dislodge this information from NASA?
Why would a FOIA dislodge it now, when it hasn’t before?
It may require Presidential emphasis (based on his “insistence” on “transparency”) to get those documents released.
Because, clearly, the existing folks haven’t let minor considerations like federal law affect them.
Dennis,
I think it was less that it was subscription based, and more that it is limited access, and thus is not making it fully public before NASA itself releases it to the general public…weak I know, but once again, is it illegal to release information that isn’t actually ITAR sensitive or classified that the government has been (possibly illegally) sitting on? Heaven forbid people provide a useful service and charge for it.
I still think that if there’s any crime here, it’s that NASA has been sitting on this data for so long, in spite of numerous FOIA requests.
~Jon
is it illegal to release information that isn’t actually ITAR sensitive or classified that the government has been (possibly illegally) sitting on? Heaven forbid people provide a useful service and charge for it.
Jon
It has nothing to do with ITAR. It has to do with the fact that a government document is being provided to an entity with a pecuniary interest in having that document and using it as a means to solicit sales. You yourself played into this with the very title of your post here. I just had a NASA official that we invited to a charity event have to turn it down because this person could not be involved in helping to sell something for a charity!
Dennis,
To be clear, I have no idea of who the leaker was, or what their motivations. I was speculating that it was because he felt L2 was not a fully public disclosure, but that’s only my guess. I don’t think he was thinking about L2 as a money generating area so much as a place where information could be shared without it becoming fully public.
Not ever having worked for the government, I have no idea the legality of that. It may possibly be the case that that NASA employee violated the law in finally releasing those appendices. But I for one am glad that they are finally out, and hope that this leads to a full and public disclosure (and less secretiveness in the future).
~Jon
To be clear, I have no idea of who the leaker was, or what their motivations. I was speculating that it was because he felt L2 was not a fully public disclosure, but that’s only my guess. I don’t think he was thinking about L2 as a money generating area so much as a place where information could be shared without it becoming fully public.
Then you should not have made the statement that you made on your site that indicated that you did know what the motivation was.
There is no way on God’s little green Earth that I would release documents that I have that the NSF crowd has been wanting to look at for years (I have some) for that reason as it violates my agreement with the government to keep such documents confidential.
Dennis,
I was wondering where in my blog post I said anything about motivations to why the appendices were posted to L2, and didn’t find anything. Are you referring to the comment I made near the end of the comment thread? I’m sorry once again that you took a comment to a blog post as some sort of authoritative statement. I can see how what I wrote could be construed that way, and I’ll admit that I tend not to be as careful with what I write in comments as I do with the actual articles I write. I apologize if it made it look like I was “in the know” when I was really just offering my best guess at why things were done. I was just giving the typical explanation I hear for why people post stuff to L2.
~Jon