NASA to ground many of its sites

August 9, 2004 7:20 PM

NASA to consolidate all their sites into the nasa.gov portalThe argument for change is that users will be served better by a single website because the agency's various sites vary in quality and content. But scientists and fans at NASAWatch say consolidation into a single NASA portal - which is more suited as collection press releases rather than in-depth information - will greatly reduce the amount of public information available from NASA. Is consolidation a good idea or is it just a power grab/manipulation by NASA administrators?
posted by stevis (11 comments total)

I once spent *hours* just trying to compile a *list* of current, ongoing NASA missions and projected missions. If they would just make a simple page for each mission, showing what the probe or craft looks like, and giving an update of what it has done, is doing, and will be doing, a lot more people would understand where billions of dollars are going.

Seriously, for most of you, do you even have a wild guess about all these missions, even just how many there are, or do you rely on hunt-and-peck news releases in the news?

Here's a half dozen good links, none of which tells the whole story:

http://www.spacer.com/

http://www.rednova.com/

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/home/index.html

http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/index.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/space_time.htm
posted by kablam at 7:47 PM on August 9, 2004

NASA HQ wants "Information is to be freely shared across the Internet, but only information that is appropriate and cleared for public release." according to their Chief Information Officer. So, if a climate researcher wanted to post information to coincide with the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" they could have posted it on the new portal, right? Wrong. I'm worried that this "efficiency" announcement is a clever way to keep scientists quiet and in line.

kablam - You're looking for this page. Which is one that will go away.
posted by stevis at 7:58 PM on August 9, 2004

One website...one portal...one people...call the Apple Commercial Girl.
posted by inksyndicate at 8:54 PM on August 9, 2004

i'm not sure what to make of this. it sounds like the reorganization under one website is not the true issue at hand...rather it is the introduction of a more intense effort at managing (read: editing) content. there is no reason that they could not put forth this effort in a non-consolidated web environment, as they have now.

cursory glances, suspect and superficial as they are, led me to read Joe Gurman's statement of which a part is:

The megalomania comes into view when you see that the folks behind this have left a bit trail describing "Web management" in organizational management terms, rather than in technical management terms. That has led them to standardize on standards-breaking technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and frankly is a fair example of what's still broken about our "corporate culture," though thankfully not one liable to risk anyone's life.

As CSS is not a "standards-breaking technology" but in fact a standard, and as this is Gurman's "fair example" of a broken corporate culture, the fear and loathing which i detect in his comments look rather unfocused.

that isn't to say that some concern isn't without merit. just that you should dab a grain of salt on the issue before you swallow.
posted by moz at 9:10 PM on August 9, 2004

Portals? Portals? It's 2004 and someone is actually resurrecting the idea of freaking portals?
posted by mediareport at 9:33 PM on August 9, 2004

I always thought it odd how Nasa urls usually have some subdomain such as jpl in them, like marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov. It looked quite awkward when they diplayed it on cnn. Maybe some consolidation will make things simpler for the public.
posted by bobo123 at 10:57 PM on August 9, 2004

posted by quonsar at 12:22 AM on August 10, 2004

bitch tits
posted by Keyser Soze at 2:10 AM on August 10, 2004

what is the story behind the picture Quonsar?
posted by Keyser Soze at 2:13 AM on August 10, 2004

I'm with you, moz. I have faced similar pushback in a corporate setting when we were asked to reflect an organizational restructuring in our web presence, and these arguments sound pretty familiar. As only an occasional user of NASA's websites, I applaud this move. They certainly can't make it any more confusing...
posted by JollyWanker at 7:28 AM on August 10, 2004

NASA sites have been thus far been created and maintained by members of the teams directly involved in each project. So divisions such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the Goddard Space Flight Center have their own domains, and their own project web sites. The fact is that these organizations had their own web sites back before most of us had ever heard of the World Wide Web. Astronomers were ahead of the curve in exploring what could be done with this new technology, and I spent a lot of time browsing these sites as an undergraduate student of astronomy back in the early '90s. The first time I remember seeing URLs on TV at all was during the coverage of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's collision with Jupiter in 1994.

I agree that it would be easier for users of these sites to find what they were looking for if they were navigable by one NASA-wide institutional hierarchy, and NASA could in principle save money on hosting and bandwidth by using shared resources. However I am concerned about what could happen to the content quality on these websites if the publishing pipeline becomes mired in red tape. The examples of Shoemaker-Levy 9, the various Mars missions, and the current Cassini mission demonstrate what can be done when science teams can rapidly communicate their findings to the public and to their peers, and those teams themselves are likely to know best what material is and is not suitable for publication at a given time. This consolidation does not have to be bad news. I hope they get it right.
posted by Songdog at 1:01 PM on August 10, 2004