'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

Former Space Shuttle boss's blog booted from Trump-era agency website

NASA has excised former Space Shuttle manager Wayne Hale's blog from its website in a reminder that nothing is forever.

Hale began his blog in 2008, as the Space Shuttle program was winding down. The agency had named him as deputy associate administrator for strategic partnerships, after he served a stint as Space Shuttle program manager and supervised the program's return to flight following the Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts.

"I was told to 'try out' some of the new social media applications," he recalled, and kept a blog on the NASA website until he retired from the agency in 2010. The blog moved into NASA's archives, but could still be found until recently, when, after some apparent housekeeping within the US space agency, Hale's posts were removed.

"I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore," he said.

We asked NASA if Hale's blog had indeed been deleted forever, or if it would be resurrected elsewhere in the agency's archives. A spokesperson for the American agency told us it's basically gone:

As part of NASA’s web modernization efforts, the agency is reducing its digital footprint, including removing blogs no longer actively maintained, have low traffic, and/or do not support an active mission.

We're relieved to say Hale's posts can be found on the Internet Archive.

The day the DEI died

Last month, NASA removed all language signposting equality efforts on its website as a result of the Trump administration's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) purge. Among them was a pledge to include a woman of color in the Artemis III mission, scheduled for 2027, which will put the first boots on the lunar surface in more than half a century (Artemis II will do a flyby in 2026). This doesn't preclude the agency from doing so, of course, but the pledge is gone.

It would be a shame if the posts remain permanently removed from NASA's site, since Hale's recollections on how the Space Shuttle program worked, its attitude to risk, and so on, remain useful lessons for today's engineers. This includes workers on NASA's program to return to the Moon, using bits of Space Shuttles and shiny new capsules.

After he left NASA, Hale maintained a personal blog, which remains available and updated with personal stories and lessons from his time at the US space agency. However, Hale's personal blog only began in 2010, with a post about some of the factors behind the termination of the Constellation program.

Constellation was a NASA program created to return astronauts to the Moon. It was cancelled in 2010.

That first post also discusses options presented during the return to flight effort following the 2003 Columbia disaster, when the returning Shuttle disintegrated as it re-entered the atmosphere over Texas and Louisiana, killing all of the occupants: Commander Rick Husband; pilot William C McCool; mission specialists Michael P Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M Brown, and Laurel Clark; and payload specialist Ilan Ramon. In what seems eerily prescient now, Hale recalled one option "was to never fly the Shuttle again, deorbit the incomplete ISS, and turn NASA into a pure R&D organization with half its existing budget."

Slash the budget of the space agency and deorbit the ISS? Surely not...

Hale, meanwhile, has printed everything out from his blog, including comments, onto paper, for compilation into a book.

All in all, it's a loss of hard-won institutional knowledge for the agency. It is also a reminder that, the Internet Archive aside, words published on the web are ephemeral and subject to an occasional over-enthusiastic application of the delete key. ®