Summary

  • On 20 July 1994, NASA announced that Headquarters would stop mailing routine news releases five days later. Readers would collect information through several electronic routes.
  • Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 supplied an eager audience. The new arrangements combined direct access with fax deliveries, mailed press kits and help for people struggling to connect.

NASA could send instruments into space. Until July 1994, it was still sending its everyday news to the mailbox. The comet then making a spectacle of itself at Jupiter gave the agency a splendid example of why the second journey deserved attention too.

On 20 July, Headquarters announced that routine news releases, contract announcements and notes to editors would cease travelling by post from the following Monday, 25 July. The original announcement offered a busy little menu of replacements: Internet services, CompuServe and fax-on-demand. Even in the Information Age, the fax machine expected to keep its job.

Geoffrey H. Vincent, the deputy public-affairs administrator heading NASA’s Internet steering group, said the change had been planned for almost a year. Now he had a particularly persuasive exhibit. Since 8 July, he reported, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory server had received more than 90,000 inquiries about Shoemaker-Levy 9’s collision with Jupiter. People were already coming for the information.

The audience arrived before the briefing

The comet fragments struck between 16 and 22 July. NASA’s impact record puts the light’s journey to Earth at roughly 48 minutes. Cosmic drama came with a substantial transmission delay before anybody could worry about a modem.

NASA had published schedules giving the expected arrival of images and the times they would be discussed on NASA TV. In a later account, Internet services manager Brian Dunbar recalled users turning up at NASA websites shortly before the pictures were expected. A briefing timetable had also become an invitation to fetch the news oneself.

There were people behind that route to the public. Former JPL public-information manager Frank O’Donnell described establishing a dialup bulletin board in the late 1980s, where callers could download pictures and text. Ron Baalke was already posting information to Usenet. NASA’s later official history of near-Earth-object research, on printed page 128, records over a million file requests from 59 countries at Baalke’s JPL comet website. Images acquired for science had acquired a public distribution problem worth having.

A reader could choose how the news arrived

The July announcement was unusually practical. Email subscribers would receive a confirmation followed by a second message explaining the service. An anonymous FTP repository held documents, with a readme describing the folders. CompuServe subscribers could enter the NASA area and choose from its categories. A fax-on-demand caller could follow telephone prompts and ask for the latest releases.

These were different ways to do a familiar job: get the document into someone else’s hands. Email brought a subscription; FTP offered a place to collect files; fax turned a request into paper at the receiving end. NASA was giving teachers, students and interested members of the public routes into material that its communications office had long sent to reporters.

The transition also had a considerate streak. Existing news organisations on the Headquarters distribution list would continue receiving releases by fax. Mission press kits would still go through the post for the foreseeable future, while text versions became available online. An automated telephone service was provided for people having trouble obtaining the information.

That last detail belongs in the history alongside the comet pictures. Putting files on a server created a new set of small, consequential questions: had the subscription worked, which folder held the document, and what could someone do when the connection failed? The release addressed them with confirmations, instructions and a help route.

Jupiter supplied the spectacle. NASA’s communications staff supplied a change in the daily machinery of news. By the end of that July, an ordinary reader could go looking for a picture, subscribe to future announcements and retrieve documents directly. The fax machine remained at its post. The routine press release, at least, could finally travel without a stamp.