NASA PR has got to Improve

For a while I was receiving NASA PR release by email and I always cringed at the attempts to be clever and sort of plain speaking. I would rather see NASA communicate a formal, high-tech, and intellectual image. Competence, able-to-solve-problems, lots of brain power being applied to complex problems that have both intellectual and down to earth significance (like, for example, understanding global warming). They do a good job of communicating with educational programs and they also have terrifically open access to deep-space encounters with planets and other bodies in the solar system. The also do well with letting scientists and engineers speak (as long as they are speaking non-politically sensitive topics!) If I had to boil down into one phrase what the NASA mission should be it’s “Understanding our place in the universe – starting with our own home planet.”