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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

ESA PR is basically hopeless. It's the polar opposite of NASA. I guess the budget is nonexistent.

Good that there are people that disseminate these things on Twitter etc.

The Rosetta and Philae stuff, Emily Lakdawalla of Planetary Society did a better job of covering it than anyone at ESA, unfortunately.

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To be fair, Emily Lakdawalla also did a better job covering the Cassini-Huygens mission than anyone at NASA. Her reporting about the Huygens RUSO/TUSO mishap and the overall mission coverage was top notch.

There aren't a whole lot of cases where Planetary Society aren't doing the better job. Two that come to mind for me are Marc Rayman's Dawn journal https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/blog/author/marc-rayman/ and HiRISE's outreach https://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/

Yeah, it's bad. But at least their Rosetta stuff was way above their regular standards, with things like [1] and [2]. Of course those were more feelgood public outreach projects than technical reporting for space aficionados. But that's exactly what ESA needs more of, they simply don't have the sort of relationship with general European public that NASA has in the US.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrctxlVWm_E

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vlOgN_3QQ

Isn't NASA prohibited from using any of its budget for explicit PR, to avoid anything remotely political?

(Honestly as a news consumer it's not all that bad because it means I can trust any communications coming from NASA proper to be purely mission oriented—focused on science.)

Nope.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/about/strat_comm.html

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