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.
"This is light on info but they're making a report later." would be a non-darkness answer.
But do you have reason to believe they're working on a detailed public report?
Because if they're not, then you missed option "NASA informs the public immediately, but never makes the details available" which would be unfortunate.
Also they probably already answered a lot of these questions internally during the last week, so it wouldn't hurt to put some of that information out.
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.
Yeah, the pen dropping is a bit over the top, but as of now the claim is that this situation is planed for and will resolve itself. A report now wont tell us anything of significance. It will get interesting if the realignment fails.
> Oversight and accountability to the citizenry is a foundational principle in a functioning democracy.
Is micromanaging what you're claiming is a strawman in my position? I'm not claiming you are saying the military doesn't need oversight, I'm probing with a concrete example where you draw the line on what constitutes a reasonable threshold of accountability. Note my statements were framed as questions to get clarification; that's not a strawman.
Your micromanaging claim is however another strawman statement. I guess I could use clarification on your point. Your equating to micromanaging is misapplied IMO. "Micromanaging" would be a direct democratic vote on most or all issues, IMO. That's not what's being asked for here here. What seems to be asked for is transparency. Access to information is not the same as having authority to make all decisions. But it is paramount in a government when people elect representatives who make decisions (or appoint those who do). The big issue I'm asking is: where is the reasonable 'trust, no need to verify' stance when it comes to public/govt work? Can we just trust tens of millions of dollars on construction projects, but not when it gets to hundreds of millions? What about aerospace? Do we say it's fine to go ahead with limited accountability when it comes to billion-dollar robotic missions, but not when there's a safety-critical application?
>A report now wont tell us anything of significance.
What makes you so confident? A report can tell us if processes were followed appropriately and, if not, if anyone was held accountable for not following them. I'd say that is pretty significant if you care about governmental fraud, waste, and abuse.
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.
You calculation only makes sense if you put zero value on operating a probe that far out in the galaxy - in which case you should be asking why there was a team working on it in the first place.
But that value is not zero, and replacing it costs quite a bit - both money and time. Asking how and why this happened is a valid inquiry.
Under the assumption that it is bricked, the value is indeed now zero.
I think where we differ is that you are assuming it will be replaced, but I don't think it will be. It's way past its design life so it was going to expire at some point.
For science, I would want to do an enquiry anyway - I'm just commenting on the financial/accountability aspect.
As a spacecraft navigation engineer, I guarantee you said post-mortem is already being written, and is probably going to be posted "publicly" anyway on some deep corner of the NASA website
This is the right call, let the people of the NASA focus on what is really important, and not waste time on PR.
It's pretty obvious that the people who managed to extend the lifetime of Voyager are very smart, based on all the tricks they had to do.
They are remotely configuring an old-tech device that is billions of kilometers away, with insane lag, and uncertainty that the underlying hardware is even responding properly.
Absolutely anything could have gone wrong at this stage.
They'll anyway investigate internally what happened, in order to hopefully, find a solution.
There is no need to spend resources to make the material public, if the goal is mostly to satisfy curiosity (though it's interesting).
There's a difference between a post-mortem and a public post-mortem. Nasa is pioneering technology that shouldn't all be public. If you really think the same post-mortem would be published in public and internally, you should not be commenting on HackerNews because it's forbidden below 13 years old.
It definitely got written up internally. Making it public is just a matter of taking that, sticking it into a pdf, and hitting the publish button. A few hours' worth of additional work at most.
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.
Ah, so you're equating mild dissatisfaction (and truly, it is incredibly mild, that's some beige entitlement alright) with demand and a sense of entitlement. I see what went wrong now! Thank you.
As the ultimate progenitor of this tangent I hereby validate thefurdrake’s interpretation. My remarks were intentionally worded to form an inquiring statement of observations and preferences, not a demand for action on the basis of obligation, and the attempt to derive an unstated and unintended sentiment of vituperative entitlement is, indeed, gross.
The unsubtle misparaphrasing of Mark Twain was included as a comedic flourish to provide a light-hearted framing of the comments, but upon review of the subsequent debate, I concede it’s possible that for some, any allusion to statecraft stimulates the adversarial lobes.
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
