ISM is Not NASA!!
Written on April 2, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
I was just watching the video of Rep. Ed Markey’s committee hearing yesterday about virtual worlds, during which Philip Rosedale (CEO of Linden Lab, creator of SecondLife®) and others testified. Rosedale showed a machinima that included images of several parts of the International Spaceflight Museum (ISM), of which I am a co-founder and CEO. That’s wonderful! But what was not wonderful is that the whole time one watches images of rockets and robots on the ISM, the voiceover is talking about the great things NASA is doing in SecondLife! As a matter of fact, they didn’t show any of NASA CoLab, which is the next island over, and which, incidentally, ISM people helped people from NASA Ames Research Center get started. No, we were not contractors, and in fact the ISM has never received any support from NASA or any other US government agency (although we have had some welcome financial support from the UK’s National Physical Laboratory). And yes, I’ve pointed out the non-NASA character of the ISM to Linden Lab people before.
Many thanks to ISM Planning Group member Paradox Olbers for the info about and link to Markey’s hearing. Be sure to check out his blog for more details and his followup interview with Markey’s staff.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Totally agree Kat– NAS A CoLab’s work in Second Life wouldn’t exist today without the help it received from ISM, but ISM was and is phenomenally successful before and regardless of NASA’s work in Second Life. I don’t know who made that video, but have asked, and would like it to be corrected asap and the mistake not repeated.
April 4th, 2008 at 1:38 am
Thanks, Andrew! I agree this was not NASA’s error. You all there have done a lot to try to avoid the confusion so many people have regarding NASA/ISM. Maybe when the SciLands does an island rearrangement we ought to have more space between the ISM and other organizations’ builds. But that’s a different topic. For now, we are following up with Linden Lab and the contractor who made their machinima (which a committee at Linden Lab then proceeded to slice and dice up to the last minute, making it almost certain that rights management would also be made a hash of, which is what happened). It’s a miracle Silver and Goldie were able to make it seem like such a smooth production in spite of it all.
April 5th, 2008 at 7:23 am
[...] got different views of the robot cargo ship. Another timely display from -altogether now, “ISM’s not NASA!” – the International Spaceflight [...]
April 6th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Kat, I saw that glaring error and was surprised. Philip must not get around as much as one would like to believe. I assume that was a big-bucks professional production by Silver & Goldie. Their client should have expected better research. I wonder what other little snippets of error slipped through that we didn’t see?
April 7th, 2008 at 2:37 am
What really hurts is that Philip has been to the ISM, before NASA ever came to SecondLife. But don’t blame Silver & Goldie. People at Linden Lab chopped up the material Silver & Goldie originally submitted to them, and they simply smoothed over the transitions of what Linden Lab had done. Ultimately, Linden Lab is responsible for the content. They accepted it, and presumably approved the content.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Funny, at the request of the lindens I provided 2 seperate videos for use in this production I thought “they” were making. One was the original NASA CoLab video, and the second was the history one Universa and I colaborated on. I didn’t see clips from either in this production.
Still a great video overall, but yeah would have been good to have the NASA/COLAB/ISM and such detailed more accurately. There’s some seriously fantastic stuff going on there
Cheers!
April 8th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
ISM is a magnet for NASA folks. Before there was a NASA presence, it was the first place for people who worked with NASA to go. I use ISM images all the time in presentations but I am careful to credit ISM and point out it was not a NASA project.
April 9th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Katherine, I want to apologize for the naming and imagery mix-up. It was never our intention to confuse or denigrate ISM’s contribution to Second Life. We took hours and hours of footage from Second Life, had other people contribute and frankly, this was a honest mistake. I’ve just emailed Goldie to take the video down and we will not distribute without rerecording the narration.
Catherine Smith
Director of Marketing
Linden Lab
April 9th, 2008 at 2:51 am
[...] ISM is Not NASA!! [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
[...] ISM is Not NASA!! [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
[...] *SciLands space and science islands featured heavily in Linden Lab’s [LL] 7 minute SL video from Machinama by Silver & Goldie. ISM(the International Spaceflight Museum)’s Spaceport Alpha island and NASA’s CoLab, a collaborative RL/SL [real life/second life] effort, as well as NOAA’s Meteroa got screen time as examples of the best that has been done in Second Life up until now. See the video Second Life®: Making the Real World a Better Place. ISM footage was misattributed to NASA CoLab, but Linden Lab and ISM are resolving the mistake, according to Kat Lemieux’s update [...]
April 10th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Blast! Somtimes you win sometimes you don’t. After seeing this video I sent the link to the interested parties at the day job I work for as its the best intro vid to SL I’ve seen and more comprehensive than the one I was working on, they all wrote back today saying the link was bad
Glad the info will be more accurate in the future. A whole lot of love has been put into the ISM. Can’t wait to see/share the video after the changes.