June 30, 2009 Vol. 2, Issue 6
NASA and the Review of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee have launched the website hsf.nasa.gov to gather input from the public about the nation’s human space flight program.
Tweets started flying just before noon on Wednesday, June 17, during the first public meeting of the committee, when committee member Edward Crawley said, “The committee is sincerely interested in a broad base of input from the national community and particularly from the youth.” He added, “I would especially invite the youth of America to comment via all the appropriate mechanisms that only they know how to do like Twittering back and blogging….What would inspire them? And how would they like to get engaged?”
The website enables users to submit a question and get an answer directly from the committee. Users can also vote on which questions they think are the most important for the committee to answer. The committee has been responding to these prioritized questions at an average of about twelve a week.
The public can post their own opinions and comments as well as interact through a variety of other social communication and networking sites such as Twitter, Flickr, UStream, Facebook, and Wikipedia, all of which feed into the main website and keep followers up-to-date on review events as they unfold.
As of June 29, the site had attracted 811 fans on Facebook and 1,197 Twitter followers.
