> Their job is to do the work and leave the communication bits to journalists.
Yeah but here is the thing. If you systematically exclude journalist. Don't give them any access. Hide everything you are doing and not even provide basic video footage of a engine test, they don't have anything to work with.
And of course that is even more true when Arianespace is flat out hiding damaging information that tax payers should know. And ESA supports them in that.
Major issues with Ariane 5 fairings were hidden from the public and it took a long time until it came out.
Lets face the facts, ESA has constructed a space monopoly and the monopolist is doing everything to hide its failures from the public, not giving journalist access so they can't talk about it. Journalist that are known to ask critical questions are routinely not invited to events.
If that is the kind of society you want to live in, be my guest. But I prefer that we actually have some accountability from our tax pair funded agency and monopolist.
> The good side of this is that science gets done reliably, on predictable budgets that span decades and not years
That's just not really true. ESA has as many project go over budget as anybody else. The Ariane 6 is a massive delayed and has a massively increased budget (and no end in sight). And we could talk about many other projects too.
The idea that ESA is some unpolitical agency that just executes perfectly is what they want you to believe and they downplay all the issues. Journalist that report on these issues have to find the details the hard way. But because space is so uninteresting in Europe there is not much good reporting on it.
Its also not true that ESA is humble and unpolitical. If they have something to brag about they do so pretty relentlessly. Go read ESA and Arianespace comments about SpaceX around 2015-2019, the were basically all over them selfes talking about how much superior they were.
And reticently they have done a lot of political lobbying to increase their budget and pushing for European space flight.
They do all these things, its just less visible to the public because the public cares less then in the US.
> That's just not really true. ESA has as many project go over budget as anybody else. The Ariane 6 is a massive delayed and has a massively increased budget (and no end in sight). And we could talk about many other projects too.
Sure, it was poorly worded. I meant from the funding providers’ side. Funding just does not get cut capriciously
for political reasons.
> The idea that ESA is some unpolitical agency that just executes perfectly is what they want you to believe and they downplay all the issues. Journalist that report on these issues have to find the details the hard way. But because space is so uninteresting in Europe there is not much good reporting on it.
Yeah, I tend to agree. But it’s not unique to space, the same is true in most fields, even technologies that affect people’s lives daily.
> Its also not true that ESA is humble and unpolitical. If they have something to brag about they do so pretty relentlessly. Go read ESA and Arianespace comments about SpaceX around 2015-2019, the were basically all over them selfes talking about how much superior they were.
Yeah, that one was quite bad. And also childish, because everyone saw what was happening and the fact that they went through so much effort to say that everything was fine was very suspicious.
Yeah but here is the thing. If you systematically exclude journalist. Don't give them any access. Hide everything you are doing and not even provide basic video footage of a engine test, they don't have anything to work with.
And of course that is even more true when Arianespace is flat out hiding damaging information that tax payers should know. And ESA supports them in that.
Major issues with Ariane 5 fairings were hidden from the public and it took a long time until it came out.
Lets face the facts, ESA has constructed a space monopoly and the monopolist is doing everything to hide its failures from the public, not giving journalist access so they can't talk about it. Journalist that are known to ask critical questions are routinely not invited to events.
If that is the kind of society you want to live in, be my guest. But I prefer that we actually have some accountability from our tax pair funded agency and monopolist.
> The good side of this is that science gets done reliably, on predictable budgets that span decades and not years
That's just not really true. ESA has as many project go over budget as anybody else. The Ariane 6 is a massive delayed and has a massively increased budget (and no end in sight). And we could talk about many other projects too.
The idea that ESA is some unpolitical agency that just executes perfectly is what they want you to believe and they downplay all the issues. Journalist that report on these issues have to find the details the hard way. But because space is so uninteresting in Europe there is not much good reporting on it.
Its also not true that ESA is humble and unpolitical. If they have something to brag about they do so pretty relentlessly. Go read ESA and Arianespace comments about SpaceX around 2015-2019, the were basically all over them selfes talking about how much superior they were.
And reticently they have done a lot of political lobbying to increase their budget and pushing for European space flight.
They do all these things, its just less visible to the public because the public cares less then in the US.