Let us suppose I own "United Boxed Lunch Company" and I win a contract to supply microgravity meals to the ISS. Just for fun I occasionally have a camera on in the Sandwich Testing Room, to placate certain anoraks who are really into sandwichspotting. Once in awhile, a large container of mustard is spilled. We turn the camera off, clean up and when we are ready, we get back to work. We are periodically checked by health inspectors as well as NASA's own contract management personnel to make certain that our boxed lunches fall within guidelines. But certain parts of the population are upset. "That sandwich belongs to the United States of America! We want to know where the mustard fell, what solvents were used to clean it, and the minutes of the meeting for the Commitee to Prevent Future Mustard Spills. This is a government program and therefore these boxed lunches and the means to go about making them, are just as public as the inner workings of a Navy galley. Now the United Boxed Lunch Company has other customers, and it has a reputation to protect. It has done its job, and shareholders do not want it to be the sourse of blooper reels on television and "Fail blogs" on streaming media. Likewise they do not want to be part of a congressional hearing on Condiment Contamination when the congressman from the next state over, whose Standard Ham and Cheese did not win the contract, has a pork flavoured ax to grind. What to do, what to do. (edited to correct spelling)
There are good arguments about withholding the full video, both from a business perspective and from a general public image perspective. Though, the argument that these companies should withhold any bad information because there are critical congress people should be a disconcerting argument. If you like or hate Congress it does have a job to do. It has a responsibility to make sure tax dollars are being spent effectively and wisely. Like I said you can agree or disagree that they are doing a good job if it. However that is their job and they can't do it if they are kept in the dark. No company or project using tax money should be beyond review of Congress, no matter what they make, how much people like them, or how bad a job Congress is doing.
A common reaction to the Dreamchaser controversy is "Who cares? It's their work., and they can release what they want". However, least 3 groups of people care:(a) Those who want to know what actually happened. Did is simply spin around but remain right-side up? If so, the damage should be confined to the bottom surface. If it flipped, or rolled, or bounced, the damage could be a lot worse. Obviously this affects schedule, odds ot this machine flying again, etc., all things folks on this forum care about very much.(b) Those who are concerned about honesty in communication. Look at the current NSA flap, for example, where they said to congress that they did not "collect" information information on Americans not under suspicion, using a patently bogus meaning of the word collect precisely to avoid the consequences of their actions. Words matter - compare your reaction if your son or daughter calls and says "I skidded off the road" vs. "I crashed the car".(c) Those who are interested in corporate crisis management. There at lots of issues in play here. If the video does indeed show a skid, but not a flip, would they have been better off showing it? Is is better to acknowledge a smaller error to avoid speculation about a greater problem? What about the court of public opinion vs. wording of the contract? Etc....
It's a different environment now Ed. This is not NASA where the general public owns the information. This is corporate and the rules are different. The corporations own the information, not the public. That’s in all the contracts those companies signed with NASA and NASA agreed to guard all corporate proprietary information.
Is video of a crash-landing "corporate proprietary information"? If so, how is video of a not-crash-landing non-proprietary?
"Commercial!", "intellectual property!", "ITAR", etc, is a response, but NASA pays the bills and writes the contract. Those contract rules can require any level of public disclosure that NASA desires, within reason.
Quote from: edkyle99 on 10/31/2013 03:55 pmIs video of a crash-landing "corporate proprietary information"? If so, how is video of a not-crash-landing non-proprietary?Yes, simply because they say so for both cases.
"Because they say so" ... that's my problem right there when it comes to something like a basic overview video. What corporate secrets are revealed in a long shot when the airframe touches the runway that weren't revealed an instant before?