Will be interesting to get some feedback from Marc Cohen who is presenting at this conference.
It looks like the conference is science driven but perhaps other uses can be explored.
Responses
The workshop was truly excellent. I’ll write up a brief highlights and an overview of the parts that seem relevant to DSG (which NASA has already given a new name and lame acronyn Lunar Space Platform Gateway, so most people just said “Gateway.”)
Stay tuned . . .
Founder of Space Architecture as a Discipline
Craig,
Sorry that I missed seeing your question. I received a similar question from an AIAA Space Architecture Technical Committee Colleague. Here is what I answered:
Keith could have submitted an abstract on science education and communicating science from the DSG for which he is a world class expert and would have been invited to attend, I bet. LPI made all the recommendations for selecting abstracts, insofar as I understand, subject to final approval by NASA SMD. We heard there were 300 abstracts accepted; some of them were brilliant, some were naive and lacking in foundation. He could have qualified, I am sure.
As for his complaint about excluding News Media; there were news media people there: Leonard David and a few others. Just because some PAO dude at NASA HQ says the press is not invited does not mean that other members of the Fourth Estate do not show up.
As for the reason for not inviting the press, NASA and the overall science community had some excellent reasons for not wanting a lot of tabloid-grade publicity. There was a fair amount of criticism of NASA management and failed planning and operations for science on ISS. This discussion was critical to formulating a better approach, but it would not have helped with NASA HQ Code A or Congress to go viral. It was a great working meeting. Can you imagine Boeing/Lockmart/NorthGrum inhouse meetings being webcast to the world? I was on the NGC/Boeing proposal team for CEV Orion Phase 2. There were lots of demonstrations of engineering and management going astray, with cursing, lying, misleading info, swearing, yelling, and even physical threats. How would that go down in a webcast?
Also, there were some novel (and possibly worthwhile) but scatological or potentially scandalous presentations. For example, one of the most novel proposals was to retrieve the Apollo LM jettison bags with the astronaut urine and fecal disposal bags in them to do an analysis of how the e. coli and other microbes survived 50 years in deep space. It could be legitimate astrobiology, but just imagine the online trolling about NASA to spend billions to collect old astronaut poop
before it goes through a proper peer review process.
