NASA Is Run By Aliens
My first job on the internet was working for a NASA satellite mission thru the University of California's Space Sciences Lab in Berkeley. I worked there when I was in school and then later got my first real grown-up job there. I will always be grateful for the opportunity the people at Space Sciences gave me. Ultimately, one of the big problems I had with the job is that once the project I was on was nearing launch, sending a satellite up to gather scientific data about solar flares, the rogueish NASA people started showing up to the lab. I'm not talking about scientists or mission controllers, I'm talking about the administrative people, the creepy guys in suits and ties, dead eyes and receding hairlines, talking about security clearances and flow of information to the public. The real "Men in Black".I was just a peon working on their websites at the time; but I got one whiff of these people and suddenly knew the truth: NASA is run by aliens. I'm not talking about the scientists or programmers; I'm not talking about people who build the rockets and make things go boom. I'm talking about the administrators, the people who run the show and call the shots. These are creepy, creepy people. No doubt I will end up on a government list somewhere for saying this, but I'm sure I'm already on it anyway.
The mission I had been working for was a first pilot program where the satellite itself was built entirely by a University. This was to be a model for future programs aimed at decentralizing NASA and delegating missions such as these (which recieve millions in government funding) to universities. It had been a decision made by congress that NASA officials and people at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena were *none* too thrilled with. So UC Berkeley's team built the satellite in a clean room in Berkeley; they worked their asses off, and when it was put together they put it on a truck and sent it to Jet Propulsion Lab for testing. Somehow during testing at JPL the satellite ended up being shaken to death on a shake table test where the amount of force delivered to the vehicle was accidentally ten times the amount of force that should have been delivered. Of course, it fell apart like a rag doll. To all of us in Berkeley, the mission appeared to have been strangled in its crib. It was a dark day in Berkeley that day.
My role in the mission was to disseminate information to the public about the mission thru a website. The missions are all publicly funded and therefore the public has a right to information about them, congress had said. So there I was one day shortly after the shake table incident when I started getting emails from project managers and people who probably didn't know what I looked like about curbing the flow of information to the public about what exactly had happened down there at JPL. Massively creeped out was I. Ultimately I did what I was told, in my own sloooooow as molasses way, figuring that if I didnt do it they would just do it themselves without me. I eventually quit the job. I think everyone thought it was because one of my other bosses on some other projects was driving me crazy, but really it was more about getting the hell away from those creepy reptilian guys in black suits with dead eyes, because no matter what projects I worked on there, ultimately I was working for those guys.
Today the New York Times is running an article on Dr. James Hansen, NASA's top climatology expert who gave a lecture in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 6.
In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet." The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.
Shortly after this talk he started recieving warnings thru unofficial (read: untraceable) channels that if he didnt stop giving talks like this there would be, QUOTE "dire consequences" for him.
In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.
He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled, and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.
But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.
...Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.
In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.
I want you to take a moment to appreciate the enormous balls it has taken for this scientist to publicly come out against this pit-bull on a stick that is our current executive branch of government. I feel like many of the scientists and programmers at NASA (or under NASA) could probably come out with many, many similar stories about the nature of the hush-hush game going on there. And I was long gone after the Bush dynasty came back into power. I can only imagine the enormity of the dark claw that is currently clamped down over the agency. Here's the New York Times article in its entirety.
posted by cyclona23 at 10:14 AM
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