While there are jokes within the response, I do not believe this to be a "joke response". The points he makes are good, and the call to action regarding careers in math and science is a fantastic way to handle a response likely to be read by 14-16 year olds throughout the reaches of the internet.
Paul Shawcross is still a long way from making amends for what he's done to help cripple our human space flight program, however.
The "Shawcross Option" might have been for the best for all we know. The shuttle was designed to be expensive, doing things that it never really needed to do. If NASA had ended the shuttle program sooner we might very well have a better space-exploration-only vehicle out on the tarmac right now instead of... what do we have now? Oh, right, nothing.
I would add that the emphasis on non-human exploration seems to be about the best possible PR and science move for NASA, it has been cheap and generated positive buzz in the media as mission after mission has exceeded expectations.
Is 96 the real number? Since the search bar always says 'featured responses'. When you click the bottom bar to see more responses it does some delayed-JS-scroll action and shows all of 8 more results.
Unless you're really trying to increase the drop-off rate on each click, why make it so crappy? How many sites set their pagination to 8 items, unless they want users to linger on what was just delivered?
They don't seem to be very serious about the petition site. Good PR, and I guess I'm glad they have the option, but it's kind of a joke.
Perhaps only in the larger umbrella. As in, "we have a site where you can sign petitions, and if you get 25k signees, you are guaranteed a response".
It sounds good in theory. But nobody in proportion to the general population is actually using it (much less heard about it), so it's just a cutesy PR move at this point.
