Dear National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
Hey, NASA (you don't mind if I call you by your acronym, do you?) '¦ uh, how's it going with you? I'm good. I've been a longtime fan, but this is my first letter. I'm really just writing to say: What the heck's wrong with you people?
Don't get me wrong, I'm still generally a fan, but you guys are making it awfully hard. I mean the whole 'boring missions' thing isn't really your fault, since the government keeps cutting your budget and you've got to do what you can. I understand that and sympathize so strongly I even wrote about it last fall. In Cut NASA some slack,"" I more or less argued, ""After all, to do all the cool, sexy things in space takes time; it can't all be people on Mars and satellites to black holes.""
And then I'm talking to a friend last month, and what do I find? You guys are acting like jerks! Way to make me look bad, NASA. So, okay, at first your goals were nice, laudable even: You'd conduct an independent study of airline safety to see if the Federal Aviation Administration's own statistics are about right. Why NASA is helping out the FAA I'm not really sure, but I just chalked that up to acronym camaraderie. One more acronym (NAOMS, for National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service, the name of this study) and $11 million later, though, it turns out you changed your mind.
Apparently you didn't want to release the results because you were afraid airline sales would decline because it would scare the public. Well, good job not freaking anyone out! That's like your financial advisor telling you, ""Let's see how that great stock is doing '¦ Oh. Okay, let's not."" So after a Freedom of Information Act request basically tells you guys, 'No, no, please: scare us,' you agree to release the results. Fine.
Except, of course, you warn everyone that ""no product of the NAOMS project ... should be viewed or considered at this stage as having been validated,"" according to the Christian Science Monitor. You say the study was flawed, which makes sense, after all, since no one's been noticing many plane crashes recently. Somehow, NASA, I'm not quite convinced.
Neither are the guys who actually did the study. According to the same Monitor article, the study's principal investigator, Robert Dodd, said they ""made an extraordinary effort to clean and validate the data."" Sounds like someone's giving us the runaround, NASA, and I don't think you have the best track record. Dodd continued, ""The resulting data is of good quality and ready for meaningful analysis."" So, maybe we should just look at the data and let the results speak for themselves.
Except that these data are poor public speakers. Apparently, NASA, you only released the raw data, streams and streams of numbers without such helpful hints as labels, parameters or units. It'd be like me showing a pie chart without any words on it and saying, as Monty Python once did, ""Telling figures indeed.""
You see what you've been reduced to, NASA? You're a joke! It's like you're just telling people not to take you seriously. Sure, it might turn out you're right and that the NAOMS study needed work, but you need to work on your communication skills.
So I implore you guys: Step things up a notch. There's a reason people believe the moon landings were fake. If you keep on going like this, NASA will start being known by another acronym, one also coined by government employees: SNAFU.
Big Fan,
Bill Andrews
Want to write letters with Bill? E-mail him at science@dailycardinal.com
