520 days in space

Scott Kelly will be retiring from NASA on April 1. I can't help but note that date; he doesn't strike me as the sort of individual that would ever really retire. Retire from NASA? Sure. I can buy that. It might boil down to something as simple as, "At this point in my career, will I ever get another mission?" Or perhaps one really can become jaded to almost anything, and 520 days is quite enough spaceflight, thank you very much.

Obviously, this is all speculation; I am amongst that large collection of people whom Kelly does not call to meet for a beer, and talk about career plans. Duh.

That said, I suspect that Kelly is just _really into it_. Beyond the point of willing to be strapped to the top of an enormous of high explosives and fired into orbit. He has, after all, treated us to a remarkable collection of photos from the International Space Station.

NASA, in their https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/astronaut-scott-kelly-to-retire-from-nasa-in-april press release has managed to ignore this. As I write this, they haven't provided a collection of the photos https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html. That's to be expected, as the NASA Web site has always rather sucked.

That is unfortunate, as many Americans still regard NASA as a huge waste of taxpayer money. This is far from the truth: NASA gets 0.005 of the budget; for every tax dollar half a cent goes to NASA. This is a matter of public record, and can be checked. See http://www.penny4nasa.org/mission/.

Meanwhile, we still have a lunatic fringe who believe that the Apollo moon landings were faked. Dealing with that is an exercise in futility. Real questions, given that NASA can't even get a penny of the budget, seem more likely to involve tradeoffs between robotic vs. manned missions.

I want both. We don't have demonstrated technology to send humans beyond lunar orbit, and robotic missions have an undeniable track record of scientific success. But manned space flight is inspirational. I don't buy purely economic arguments against it. First off, because economists are famous for getting almost nothing right. Secondly, because even if economists had a solid bead on things, some things are worth doing for reasons that have _nothing whatever to do with economics_.

Back to those Kelly photos.

And bite me, NASA. Why do you provide nothing, from one of your own people, while ancient (and largely irrelevant) IT trade rags such as PC Magazine can manage it? Though they will drop a pop-under ad in front of you, despite your settings in popular browsers. Given the rate at which ad networks are currently being compromised, hence being used to compromise user systems, that's a problem. And even then, you still have another click to get to a slideshow. Not going to do a link.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160229-scott-kelly-nasa-astronaut-space-year-pictures-photography/ seems to be one of the more honest ones. You still have to click another link, and you only get 15 images, and there is a bit going on behind the scenes that seems a bit dodgy. As is the case with some mass-media, such as http://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/coming-home-look-back-scott-kelly-s-year-space-n525226.

One might try scottkelly.com but will take you to a domain-squatter.

So, yeah, NASA continues to be it's own worst enemy, in both the PR/outreach and history departments. That is really unfortunate. I didn't save some images that I loved, and they don't seem to be available any longer. Articles that got some press about how they screwed this particular pooch in the past, such as http://www.wired.com/2014/04/lost-lunar-photos-recovered-by-great-feats-of-hackerdom-developed-at-a-mcdonalds/ seem to be lessons not learned.