Zvezdichko's UFO thread...

[Nicolas]

Originally Posted by Zvezdichko

Hm, thanks for the links, I will give them to my friend, but I'm personally not interested.

I do wonder why so many people claim that NASA is a top secret agency. Compared to Chinese space administration and even ESA, NASA is a very open agency.

ESA is very open, only it's not a real PR machine, if you know what I mean. If you look for it long enough, you will find a lot of information, if you ask them, you may get a lot of information, but they won't set up a fancy website and taunt about it on their own TV channel.

[Zvezdichko]

Emmm yeah... A lot of people would like to see real-time images and raw data being published instantly. Luckily, we had Huygens images published instantly, ATV images and video in real time.

[Sigma_Orionis]

ESA probably needs a PR machine much less than NASA because it's not seen as a waste of money by the average EU citizen.

[Laguna]

Originally Posted by Sigma_Orionis

ESA probably needs a PR machine much less than NASA because it's not seen as a waste of money by the average EU citizen.

You might want to guess again...

[Zvezdichko]

NASA? Waste of money? When it reaches 1% of tax funding, call me again.

[Nicolas]

Originally Posted by Laguna2

You might want to guess again...

In Belgium, it's quite OK. Then again, we don't shout the cost of everything in every article. But compared to its size, Belgium pays quite a lot of money (per citizen) on space. That's also the reason why we've got more astronauts than for example the Netherlands, who pay less per citizen.

[Sigma_Orionis]

Laguna:

So in Germany they think it's a waste of money too? yikes!

Zvezdichko:

Well yeah, from what I have read here it seems that the public in the US considers that NASA is this big super-dooper government agency with hidden funding that sucks all they money thrown out at them, or something like that.

[Laguna]

As Germany pays >22% of ESA's Budget there is more talk about wasted money, better to spend for the poor... yadda yadda.
But, actually if you would ask someone on the street what ESA is, I would guess that 50% would not know.

[slang]

Originally Posted by Sigma_Orionis

ESA probably needs a PR machine much less than NASA because it's not seen as a waste of money by the average EU citizen.

Over here it's still a big thing, getting lots and lots of exposure, when an astronaut from one of our countries goes up. Sometimes when I'm telling friends from the USA that I'm watching NASA TV for a shuttle landing, I get responses like, "oh, there was one up?". Anecdotal evidence, but a bit telling nonetheless IMHO.

[LaurelHS]

I think it's similar here in Canada. If one of our astronauts is on a Space Shuttle flight, it gets a lot of attention on the news and they bring former astronauts on programs like The National to be the expert voice and everything, but otherwise the flights don't get much coverage and the news doesn't really go into detail about them.