The next space station crew, Expedition 11, launched last night from Russia, but you probably didn’t hear about it from a NASA webpage.
Melanie walked in yesterday and mentioned that a bunch of the main NASA web portals had no headlines about “Next Crew Launches Tonight!” or “Expedition 11 Takes Off!” I was skeptical at first, giving NASA public affairs the benefit of the doubt. I mean, launching a new crew is a pretty big deal, right?
But then I went and looked around a few pages and…nothing! At the NASA Human Spaceflight website, the headline under the Space Station side is simply telling you that the web location of info is changing. They have only a tiny link to the Expedition 11 Preflight Briefing Materials. So you click on “Space Station” to go into that section. And there under “Latest News” you find info about last night’s launch, but yesterday, hours before launch, there was nothing.
Even on NASA’s main homepage, a headline about the launch is tiny under the “News” column, while the huge splash feature cycles through something about our new NASA administrator, then Return to Flight, and then shows something about Expedition 11.
I know the new administrator and RTF are important, but last night we (via the Russians) were launching people.
How can we expect the public to truly support NASA if we don’t do a kick-butt job of selling ourselves?
That is weird. It was on the CNN main page.