Space Forum / Shuttle / October 2007

A few years ago, some events set in motion a bunch of decisions to
prevent normal people from accessing normal data such as launch times
and TLAs for satellites or even viewing the white room on the KSC web site.

One victim was NASA's own JPASS applications which allowed intelligent
display of satellite passes over a location.

Since those times, NASA has been allowed to pre-announce launch times
again. But JPASS is still devoid of TLAs and thus unusable (even though
the app is still there).

Is there a reason why those NASA provided applications couldn't be
granted access to the TLAs so that they could again be usable ?

Preventing general public download of TLAs is one thing, but preventing
NASA applications from accessing NASA data is a bit silly. The other
applications available on the spaceflight.nasa.gov don't come close to
what jpass provides, yet, they provide TLA information in one of their
menus.