Writes Eric:

Lew:

NASA spends many more millions on self-promotion. In the early 1980’s I worked in a NASA lab where we had very expensive taxpayer bought computer graphics gear, which were mostly used to create the computer animated “voyager fly by movies”.  These were often shown on the nightly news and the dumb reporters would present it as actual footage, never asking where was that camera that was filming the spacecraft from some 150 feet behind it.  We would tie up many computers for days computing the frames for these movies. Naturally, other uses, would have to wait while these promotional films were made.

Some of this same equipment was used by Carl Sagan to examine pictures that had recently come from a Mars Viking lander. One day Carl and a co-worker were checking on some unknown movements on Mars. I overheard Carl say, “Now remember, don’t tell anyone we might have found life since if we’re wrong on this, we may never get any funding again”. That was the mentality. I later laughed when the Jodie Foster character said the same thing in the movie Contact, based on Sagan’s book.

There was also a love hate relationship with Carl Sagan in those days, as many of my co-workers were quite jealous of Sagan when he would appear on the Johnny Carson Tonight show. I recall how they would generate fake pictures of Mars and leave them out for Sagan to take onto the show. They would chuckle for days after and told me that map makers in olden days were famous for this. Some were also upset that Sagan would use their equipment to generate animations that were used in his Cosmos series. NASA loved the credits it got from that show, another promotional expense paid by you know who.

But perhaps most ironic was when I visited the gallery overlooking the “spacecraft assembly building” where they would spend unknown millions in a sterile clean room environment to insure that no microbes would hitch a ride to Mars and contaminate the planet. It’s funny how it’s never mentioned when they talk about plans to send humans to Mars since we each are inhabited in and out by trillions of microbes. So much for keeping these bugs off of Mars I guess.

But for taxpayer paid fun, you really can’t beat working and playing at NASA.