Nasa to make an MMO
 

I stole this post from the Penny Arcade website. Penny Arcade is, if you don't already know, one of the largest game focused web comics around, drawing in hundreds of thousands of readers, perhaps more. If you don't already, I recommend checking out the site.

"You might have heard that NASA was trying to gin up an MMO. We just received a mail from a human being involved in the project, someone who wants to make sure they collect the best ideas from the best people. Naturally, she thought of the readership here. Her mail follows:

I know how incredibly unpleasant this could end up being if we don't
have the right minds behind it, and would just like the chance to get it
in front of as many potentially talented people as possible. Would you
guys consider posting a sentence on this in the news section soon?

"The purpose of this RFI is to solicit information from organizations
with proven immersive synthetic environments expertise who are
interested in potentially forming a MMO platform development partnership
with NASA. We are currently targeting releasing a Request for Proposal
in March 2008."

Here's a couple of run-downs in English from people outside NASA:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2...eeks-inpu.html
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2...l#previouspost

And the NASA sites:
http://procurement.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/...i?acqid=128415
http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/submit.html

NASA gets surprisingly tiny amounts of money (about $17B/yr) to go to
freakin' space and do a whole lot of discovering of various
humanity-impacting things. And a lot of people just don't know the
amount of awesomeness we do for that. We're working on many things to
try and communicate to people better about what we do (that's part of
our forming mandates, actually), and this is one initiative.

And I think it would be cool if it wasn't a big mess, or even just an
"eh" thing. I'd like to see it be *good*.

For the space program, guys?

Oh, but darling: you had us at immersive synthetic environments.

(CW)TB"