Some of them are probably old enough to have been screwing over NASA since the end of Apollo.
The Office of the Chief Scientist does more than just weigh in. The Planetary Society had been trying for 25+ years to put a mic on Mars. We'd sent cameras to mars, but we'd never sent a mic. It was a combination of denials ("there's no real scientific purpose" was the pushback) and bad luck (the first mission in 1999 crashed so did another - more here, https://www.planetary.org/sci-tech/mars-microphones ).
Here's a Web 1.0 page from the 90's on it, https://research.ssl.berkeley.edu/marsmic/whatisit.html
We finally got a microphone on Mars in 2021 thanks (in part) to the Dr. Jim Green. At the time, he was the head of NASA's Planetary Science Division, and along with his colleagues, he put his weight behind the payload and helped get it past the bureaucracy. His push wasn't the only push. A LOT of people worked on it, but it was an important one.
He is also the reason why NASA got into Planetary Defense. He also pushed for the NEO Observations Program. I remember talking to him about this a few years ago. IIRC, he pushed for the creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) to make an explicit Planetary Defense team within NASA.
He also helped refocus NASA on the search for life on Mars. And as Chief Scientist, he started putting his weight behind terraforming Mars, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-ma...
Every large organisation, every bureaucracy needs someone like Jim to get interesting ideas across the finish line.
Jim consistently did that across his career, and the office of Chief Scientist give him the ability to seriously advocate for "crazy stuff" (not his words) like Martian life and terraforming.
His successor is much the same. I think this closure is a net loss for humanity.
IIRC we would've actually had audio to accompany video of the skycrane landing, but the mic had an issue at that time.
juujian•6h ago
I get that they are trying to highlight the administrations hypocrisy, but stronger wording would really be appropriate. That scientific integrity has always just been a fig leaf that should never be taken at face value, a red herring.
quantified•6h ago
MengerSponge•6h ago
terminalshort•5h ago
mrexroad•4h ago
I normally leave flippant remarks like this to Reddit, but this make-nasa-space-again b/c earth-science-is-lies narrative is so fucking stupid it deserves a stupid response.
MengerSponge•3h ago
nickff•6h ago
>"a fig leaf that should never be taken at face value, a red herring"
thaumasiotes•6h ago
(b) If you are a nonnative speaker, what's the difference between looking up an unfamiliar idiom and an unfamiliar word?
(c) Your pulled quote contains only two idioms. My best guess is that you're calling face value an idiom, but it is a transparent construction that means exactly what you'd expect if you knew the words face¹ and value.²
¹ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/face noun 5(a)(1)
² https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/value noun 1; 8
nickff•5h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_value
thaumasiotes•4h ago
(a) These are all common vocabulary items;
(b) If you are a native speaker who needs to look up a lot of words, what makes these different? ;
(c) face value is not an idiom. It is compositional.
What would you say if you saw a reference to someone as a "Svengali"? That is a literary allusion. It can't be an idiom because it's only one word long. Do you think it's an idiom anyway? In what sense?
It's possible to understand face value as metaphorically referring to the face value of a coin, or as directly referring to the value that any given object or event appears or purports to have on its face, but in either case it won't be an idiom.
> but excessive use of idioms makes it hard to understand what someone is actually trying to say
This is just false. From a communications or a vocabulary perspective, there is no difference between "idioms" and "words".
mulmen•5h ago
forgotoldacc•3h ago
I think it's my first time ever seeing anyone online request someone else to not use idioms. Like a teacher correcting an essay or something.
Robelius•3h ago
BobbyTables2•2h ago
(not /s)
deadbabe•3h ago