Educational outreach is an important part of what NASA does. For the low cost of a letter they most likely encouraged a kid to have a career in the sciences. In my mind that is peak efficiency.

In fact, probably the only reason NASA still exists is its significant effort at educational outreach - just sticking their head down and working on their projects without communicating with the population that funds them would result in the "NASA does nothing relevant today" meme overshadowing the work it does.

The efficient guy in me agrees with the overall sentiment, though not with the tone.

My inner nerd had a big, fat smile on his face when reading the story and, if I was the person to receive the letter, I'd probably have "wasted" the 10 minutes the response took because I would not be who I am today if not for highly paid scientists encouraging me. And I'd have put in 10 minutes unpaid overtime to make up for it - I'd not be surprised if the respondent did the same.

Kids are import and they really matter for us humans: They'll solve future problems if we invest the time to love and encourage them.

EDIT: Ffs, please unflag the parent comment - do we really only want to read comments that fit into our own bubble? What happened to discourse?

You are likely enormously underestimating the % of HN crowd who got into computers, science, engineering, etc because they were inspired at a young age by stuff like this.

NASA is doing a good thing with promotional actions like this.

coming from a country that didn't and still probably doesn't have a dedicated space institute, I would like to let you know this this is a fantastic thing that they did.

Kids need encouragement, they need role models.

Hey, have a little fun.

> I don't know exactly how to react to this...

Not like that.

Would you please not make the thread even worse by throwing in a personal attack? Your comment would have been just fine without that bit.

Sorry where was the personal attack?