Criticism of NASA
I fund the U.S. federal government by paying taxes. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government.
Therefore, I fund NASA.
If you pay U.S. taxes, then you are funding NASA, too.
Since we are funding NASA, we should keep them under scrutiny and hold them to a high standard. Since NASA is being funded by us, it should support our intentions of intense criticism, and should hold itself to a high standard.
A great place to start this criticism is at NASA's self-proclaimed values. Let us observe NASA's missions and values.
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NASA: Our Missions and Values
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error
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The official NASA website - www.nasa.gov - has a page dedicated to its core missions and values.
Unfortunately, when I opened the page, I was not greeted with missions and values, but instead a 404 error message. It reads:
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404
The cosmic object you were looking for has disappeared beyond the event horizon.
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Is this a joke? If so, our journey to critique NASA has begun with NASA making a joke of its own work. I could have made a joke myself without paying any government agencies for it.
If NASA makes jokes, why? and why are we funding it? We already have comedians who create great jokes and are astronomically less expensive, plus we can get a meal out of the comedians (their shows, that is!).
Then, how do we determine when NASA is joking, and when it is serious? Some would say the moon having lava and volcanoes sounds like a joke, but it is precisely what NASA suggests the moon had years ago. Is that a joke, too? If you are just a reader of NASA's work, how would you know?
If we are allowing NASA to make jokes, how elaborate of jokes are we allowing it to make? How about deceitful jokes? How often?
Perhaps we should expect NASA to diligently clarify when it is joking and when it is serious. If that cramps NASA's style, so what? perhaps NASA should not have that style. Get back in line and quit joking around with my money. Give me my money back and go jump in a black hole.
This is our first encounter with NASA, and NASA has me spending time wondering if it is joking around with my money or if it is just seriously incorrect with my money.
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The cosmic object you were looking for...
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I was looking for NASA's missions and values. NASA should have presupposed this, since the page I was on was titled: "our mission and values".
Missions and values are concepts, not cosmic objects. NASA should know this, since NASA is to be precisely concerned with both 'cosmic objects' and 'concepts'. Does NASA think missions and values are cosmic objects?
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NASA presupposes I was looking for a cosmic object, but I was not.
It has now been established NASA is incorrect on its official website.
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...has disappeared beyond the event horizon.
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What is an event horizon?
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Event Horizon: The boundary surface surrounding a black hole, from outside of which nothing inside can be observed, because nothing inside that surface, even light, can escape beyond it.
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Perhaps this is what NASA means.
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If NASA does think their values are a cosmic object, then they must claim their own values have disappeared into a black hole.
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What a stupid website!
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If NASA is trying to be cute, they better be trying even harder to get their core values back up and running on their silly cutesy website.
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NASA: The Complexity of Finding Core Values
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NASA's website is frustrating to navigate. If its core values are accessible by using the homepage as a starting point and navigating solely through the website, then it is not easily accessible. The website is complicated and hardly has any solid content on a given single page. Most pages I saw if not all pages, have maybe a paragraph or two of writing, and then a bunch of links to highly specific and vaguely relevant articles.
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The way I was able to find the 'Missions and Values' page was by searching it on an internet search engine, outside of the NASA website. I could not even find it in the 'About NASA' page. It was from clicking the link on the search engine results that I was able to end up on the 'NASA Missions and Values' error page. Luckily, the search engine shows a snippet of NASA's currently inaccessible 'Missions and Values' page. It reads:
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Our Missions and Values | NASA
Core Values: We share a set of core values—safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, inclusion—and they are evident in all that we do. There are jobs and there are careers. But at NASA, our work is more than just a profession—it's a lifelong pursuit, a passion—and a chance to change the history of humanity.
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First of all, since NASA is talking about changing the history of humanity, they must either not understand what history is, or they must be working on a time machine. Or, they must be referring to altering historical records of mankind.