This post is about NASA. Yes, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  I have been watching NASA-TV for a few months and have experienced a kind of crippling inverse rapture.  NASA-TV is video pageantry designed to spread the gospel of rocketry and aerospace and I guess that is fine.  But it is mostly whizbang content that lacks a bit of substance.

Well, duh.  Of course.  They’re in the launch business, dummy.

I’m actually not going negative on NASA.  I believe in what the agency is doing and I’m pleased to pay taxes to support it.  But if you listen to what NASA people say, much of what they do is related to supporting the “science package”.  This is because space scientists need rocketeers to hurtle things out of the gravity well for them.

But this NASA venue never seems to pony up the science itself.  I have yet to see NASA-generated programming that offers much of the actual scientific grits and gravy.  Obviously, every morsel is written up in journal articles and fashioned into PowerPoint presentations to be scrutinized by squinting fuss-budgets (you know, “scientists”) in colloquia everywhere.  If you want to see the actual scientific results then you have to plop down at a university library with a journal and read the article or pay to download copy.  That’s fine, but this only serves the specialists.

It may be due to the nature of the funding. A PI comes in with a big wad of cash from a grant and basically NASA just provides the launch and control services.  NASA has no particular claim over the data or its disposition. Perhaps someone can set me straight on this.

Irrespective of how NASA works, here is what I’m frustrated with. Seeing the drama of the launch, the machinations of getting a probe to it’s destination, and then receiving the pretty pictures as the only reward. It puts me into insulin shock.  NASA is good at programming this kind of content- the Hope and Crosby road trip angle. But what are the results? What measurements were taken and what did we learn? NASA teases us with the show business end of space exploration but comes up short in communicating the scientific results.

So, here is what I’d like to see.  I would like to see a few researchers, with the support of NASA, periodically present their results to the public on NASA TV. I’d like to see the data and their conclusions and uncertainties- warts and all.  The public needs to see this.  Endless footage of exuberant space reseachers gushing at the potential benefits for mankind have worn thin.  It is time for these folks to tell us exactly what they are finding.

But some suggest that maybe raw science is too advanced for the public audience.  I’ve heard this sentiment before and can only argue that it is not NASA’s job to decide if we’re smart enough to understand the results from this research.  If the launch is important enough to spend $300 million on, then lets see what we learned.

The message we give people is that space science is the science of telescopes and rockets. This equipment is inportant, but it is not the focus of the activity. We launch these packages so we can study the stuff that is out there. How much stuff is there, what is the stuff doing and, what is that stuff anyway?  Let’s hear more about the stuff.

The public needs to see how data is collected and how it is reduced to some kind of conclusion.  Much of NASA TV consists of video feed from the ISS.  It is often mind numbing in it’s tedium, watching astronauts floating in front of a work station twiddling this or that. To hell with that.  Let’s see some data.  Let’s hear the scientists interpret their results.  Let’s all experience the buzz of enlightenment as a new concept washes over our consciousness. That is the true excitement of science.