The latest entry in a race to capitalize on the perceived hunger for reports about the next frontier and beyond opened on the Web this week.
But unlike the plainly commercial aims of the best-known sources for news about humanity's venture into the cosmos -- from Florida Today's Space Online to former CNN financial heavyweight Lou Dobbs' ambitious Space.com -- SpaceRef is attempting to turn a noncommercial source of inside NASA information combined with a space-oriented search database into the backbone of a mainstream portal.
SpaceRef is a collaboration between Marc Boucher, a Web site developer in Victoria, British Columbia, who runs a site for the Mars Society and other space groups, and Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee from Reston, Virginia, who maintains NASAWatch.
Cowing's site combines a Drudge Report attitude -- "This is not a NASA Web site. You might learn something," NASAWatch proclaims -- with a activist sensibility. Another slogan: "Remember: It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work -- for YOU."
He has a muckraker's penchant for dredging up embarrassing meeting minutes, agency memos, even unpublished photographs of problem areas on the space shuttle fleet. The site also aggregates the day's top space news and links to dozens of other sources of space information. In other words: a classic Web-age, grass-roots, hellraising, little-guy-makes-a-difference site.
Cowing, a biologist, worked for NASA as both a civil-service staffer and as an astrobiology contractor for nine years ending in 1993. An avid follower of the agency's fortunes, he started publishing on the Web when NASA announced plans for budget cuts and layoffs in 1996. By the time the reduction-in-force crisis passed, in part because of public pressure he helped generate, he realized he had already developed a loyal readership and decided to keep going.
"I have a staff of 20,000 people," he says -- NASA's rank and file. "And I have a great feedback mechanism that tells me if I'm doing my job or not."
If he strays from the goal of showing what happens behind the agency's closed door, his NASA sources will dry up.
That hasn't happened. Scoops aren't necessarily all earthshaking, though. They range from the serious -- inside-NASA photographs of wiring defects that grounded the shuttle fleet this fall -- to the silly.
Cowing has, with the help of anonymous sources, documented NASA administrator Dan Goldin's "obsession" with eradicating "the worm," as the agency's old logo is known, a campaign that NASAWatch says has involved public tantrums.
NASAWatch has an audience of about 10,000 visitors on its busiest days, Cowing says. But it's an elite group. From studying the site's logs, Cowing estimates that 15 to 20 percent of his readers are NASA employees.
As to whether Cowing's activism and muckraking will fly in a mainstream site, both Boucher and Cowing emphasize that NASAWatch will be "toned down" for the SpaceRef audience. "The difference between Matt Drudge and me is that I have a switch," Cowing says. "I can turn the opinion off when I have to."
Boucher makes it clear that SpaceRef is intended to be a neutral site where both enthusiasts and serious researchers can go for an encyclopedic slice of space data.
"We're filling a market niche that's been empty: a directory and search engine that's devoted strictly to space," Boucher says. He emphasizes that SpaceRef isn't a direct competitor to Space.com, a breaking-news and information site that Dobbs has said he hopes to merge with a large media company. In fact, Boucher says, SpaceRef is designed to sign up Space.com and other cosmos-oriented sites as customers.
"Our business model is threefold: advertising, ecommerce, and licensing our search engine. If Space.com wants to license us, they can have their own branded search," Boucher said. He added that he is in discussions with several potential licensees, but hasn't signed up anyone yet. The site, still in beta, has yet to sign up its first advertisers. SpaceRef's autumn launch is timed to take advantage of a wave of public interest in next month's big space event: the arrival of the Mars Polar Lander at the fourth planet's ice cap.
And the news on that front is good. Unlike the Mars Climate Orbiter, destroyed or lost in September when mission engineers confused metric and imperial units in their programming instructions, the Polar Lander is on course for its 3 December arrival.
