Slipping the Surly Bonds of Earth

Space Flight Tragedy, II

Today’s crash of the SpaceShip Two Enterprise craft is the second space-related tragedy in a week. I’ve already written about the Antares explosion at Wallops Island, VA, and the story on that crash is being thoroughly investigated. The story is coming out and the process is working.

The crash today over the Mojave Desert took the life of the Enterprise’s co-pilot; the pilot is in a hospital fighting for his life. We do not at this time have a lot of solid information about what caused the plane to crash, but from witness accounts and the few images I’ve seen online, it’s pretty clear something went wrong right after the plane was dropped from the White Knight Two jet-powered mother ship. The plane broke up, it appears that the pilot was able to eject to relative safety.

Our thoughts are with the families and team members involved in this mission, which was part of an ambitious scale-up to space tourism by Virgin Galactic. Their losses are incredibly painful, even as we follow their difficult steps to space.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion and crash to Earth, I really dreaded the media firestorm. We saw a lot of really stupid media coverage after the Antares loss on Monday, and there was an immediate upswing in really bad click-baity stuff almost right away. Twitter had a fair amount of decent “live Tweeting” going on, while the mainstream media either didn’t have the story, or put up “BREAKING NEWS” squibs with a few sentences.

Unfortunately, some outlets just totally screwed the pooch with their reporting.

Where are the science journalists?  Why don’t outlets employ experts to write about these things for them? Are we such a click-bait driven society that well-written stories are a thing of the past? After surveying what passed for science and tech coverage in the big (non-technical) outlets this week and especially today, I really wonder about that.

The most thoughtless story I saw today was from Wired, where the hopelessly sardonic and tastelessly hip and ironically ignorant writer focused on how these missions were unnecessary caviar for the rich. You call that objective journalism?  You call it science tech journalism? They apparently think it is.

I don’t. It’s an opinion, masquerading as really crappy reporting. It’s click-bait pandering. It totally ignores the science and technology work that has gone into these missions, which would eventually be used in regular civilian travel (someday), once they solve the problems. The copilot’s death wasn’t really a concern for Wired, it was as if they were dismissing his passing as part of their witless coverage. If I were you, I wouldn’t rely on that outlet for objective news or commentary. Not worthy of your attention.

I also don’t want to see any more stupidity from outlets such as Fox News, which can’t even figure out who launched the rocket on Monday. Yes, that band of journalistic geniuses couldn’t even be bothered to do a little fact-checking before plastering inaccurate headlines on their pages about how NASA launched the rocket. For their information (and I’ll even let Fox “News” use it without attribution), the rocket was assembled and launched by Orbital Sciences Corporation, which is a contractor for NASA. They are NOT NASA. There’s a crucial difference between the two, and one that is not lost even on kids. Apparently Fox News didn’t get that distinction and so the same headline keeps showing up, dumb and dumber.

What I suspect is that Fox finds it convenient to blame NASA because that’s part of its “blame government for everything”  meme. It would not go too well with them to blame a corporation, since corporations might not advertise and that would cut this dubious source of journalism from a source of revenue. It just wouldn’t do for Fox to look anti-business. But, you know what… even businesses make mistakes. And they pay for them. As OSC is aware. At least they came clean about their responsibility and are moving forward.

What would I like to see when things like this happen?  How about:

1. accurate reporting,

2. fact checking before running with a story,

3. publishing facts, not opinions,

4. not rushing to publication,

5. no more click-bait using people’s lives for site hits.

Journalism folks, we can do better than this. Readers and news consumers, you should expect more from the media. Don’t accept pap.

Look, we all had the story today. It played out in front of our eyes, just as it did on Monday. So it really didn’t matter if Outlet A had the story six seconds before Outlet B.  It did matter that some outlets found third-hand, unconnected “experts” to opine about the “end of spaceflight”, “space is too dangerous”, etc. without having any facts to back them up. And others just handed it off to the Tragically Hip Newsdeck for outrageous opinion pieces. That’s all part of a rush to publication for both events that resulted in a lot really stupid stuff pretending to be “news”.  And, on a day when a man lost his life, and families got the worst news of their lives, it just wasn’t worth the click-baity, misleading, and just plain wrong reporting. It really wasn’t.

The Risk of Exploration Gets Lost in the Rush to a Story

There is this larger feeling that gets expressed any time there’s a space accident that space travel of any kind is some way to waste money while poor people starve (or insert your own whining analogy if that one doesn’t work for you). Yet, what nearly ALL of the whiners miss is that the MONEY spent on space travel is money spent to pay people’s salaries. It pays them to build the spacecraft, develop the technologies, see the missions through, create the science experiments, and build the instruments needed for the missions. That money is taxed, which goes to pay for schools and roads. A space/tech worker’s salary helps pay for housing, clothing, food, toys, iPhones, phablets, and even for political donations and tithes at churches (if the workers so desire to spend it that way). It pays for movie tickets, cars, gas, books, music, vacations.  It contributes to the economy in a way that crappy faux journalism doesn’t.

I don’t want to hear about money spent on space is wasted. I don’t have time for you when you say that. It tells me you haven’t done your homework. You haven’t used your brains. And you haven’t figured out what reality is. If you really do think that exploration is a waste of money, then please stop reading history, or using airliners, or buying new cars, or using the latest medical equipment, or doing any of the other millions of actions that relied on exploration and experimentation. You wouldn’t want to benefit from something that comes from activities that you wrote off as useless, would you?  I mean, who wants to be a hypocrite, right?

The Time for Mourning is Now

Let’s honor these people for their sacrifices and be honest with ourselves about what we stand to gain from those losses. The companies involved in both mishaps this week will pick themselves up, figure out what went wrong, and will come back stronger and better. That’s what airlines do when planes crash; it’s what car makers do when their products are shown to have severe problems. I wish it was what news outlets did when their products are shown to be wrong, lazy, and misleading.

Now, let’s honor the man who slipped the surly bonds of Earth today. Don’t let his death come to mean the death of technological advancement. Honor it by encouraging our tech companies and funding NASA to become stronger and prouder.