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Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

I think it emphasizes the importance of the results - it's for everyone, not just scientific types.

Back in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson "expressed interest" in the first close-up pictures NASA got from the Moon on Ranger 7. The freshly developed images were loaded onto a plane and the President got a private briefing with the head of NASA on the very same day. (sorry, I don't think I can link the picture) https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4210/pages/Ch_18.htm

>President got a private briefing with the head of NASA

head of NASA aka the Vice President. maybe you meant the NASA administrator?

I think they mean James Webb.

As a side note, I thought the NASA Administrator reported to POTUS.

Very possibly. It's in my head that the NASA Administrator "reported" to VPOTUS, but that could just be from a bit in a movie more so than real world.

Nobody reports to VPOTUS.

Except the entire senate, but that's okay, they're a bunch of nobodies

The senate does not report to the VP.

Read the constitution.

Kinda? But honestly I bet the people who worked on it are excited by the prestige of having the president release them. It'll get way more eyeballs on the event I'm sure, and he's almost certainly going to praise the people who worked on it

Way more people will pay attention to the President announcing it than "so-and-so from NASA". Though I too hope he passes it over to the team to explain the findings.

If my ego were so large that I’d rather present my own work than let the POTUS do it for me, I’d probably be running Tesla.

It's quite the opposite. It's an honor that this is big enough news that the president is going to be the one presenting this to the world.

Nixon called Neil and Buzz on the moon. Reagan sent a message of good wishes to STS-1 (he was recovering from an assassination attempt). Biden gets to present the government’s telescope pix. It’s one of the honors of being the President.

Carter wrote a message included in the Voyager Golden Record. These are formalities which I don't understand why that person was upset at this.

A phenomenon I've noticed is that the most important person in an organization tends to always make the coolest announcements. This applies equally to the government and to corporations.

Dear presidents, governors, and CEOs, please let lower level employees make the cool announcements.

I'm of two minds here. I agree with you but hopefully having Biden involved in the briefing will draw more attention to what I think it one of the coolest large science and engineering projects in decades (just my opinion).

No. Biden does not take credit for the images and will present them as decades of international effort. The former President would claim he took the images all by himself.

He has presided over one of those decades

Biden's probably not going to be taking credit for any images this week.

Depends on what we see in the images. If we see space structures that are undeniable artificial, spanning tens of billions of light years in size, yes, that would be something that the president would announce.

If the telescope saw any undeniably artificial structure billions of light years in size, there would be a lot more to worry about than who announces it. It would effectively be like discovering god given how absurd a size billions of light years is.

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