[HN Gopher] The curious case of fake NASA geniuses
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The curious case of fake NASA geniuses
        
       Author : Brajeshwar
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2021-09-19 06:50 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (openthemagazine.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (openthemagazine.com)
        
       | Mountain_Skies wrote:
       | There's a related phenomenon with young women claiming they're
       | training to be the first person on Mars. They, and usually their
       | parents, carefully craft a media personality where editors and
       | readers fill in the blanks to assume the "astronaut in training"
       | is part of NASA. That the agency exerts little control over its
       | name and logo makes this much easier to accomplish. If a media
       | organization goes through the effort of contacting NASA, they
       | will be told that the "astronaut in training" is not affiliated
       | with NASA. That these young women (for some reason I've yet to
       | see this media manipulation work for young men) attend Space Camp
       | gives them something with NASA on it they can point to so others
       | will make the erroneous assumption they're in NASA astronaut
       | training.
       | 
       | As far as I can tell, nothing they're doing is illegal. Anyone
       | can say they're training to go to Mars. Anyone can buy NASA
       | t-shirts and any child can attend Space Camp. NASA doesn't
       | regulate the use of its name in twitter and Instagram account
       | names. In most cases it appears that the media either doesn't
       | look very deeply into verifying these people are who they're
       | presenting themselves to be or are willing participants in
       | deceiving the public themselves. It makes for a nice article or
       | fills airtime to have on a teenager in a flight suit covered in
       | NASA patches talking about inspiring other youth to follow their
       | path to becoming an astronaut.
       | 
       | But at least the young people in the article and the ones posing
       | as "aspiring astronauts" have more common sense than the young
       | lady who lost her internship with NASA because she was slinging
       | profanities at a member of the agency's advisory board while
       | celebrating her appointment.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-09-19 23:00 UTC)