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 earlier in the week, 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 event occurred and for some while afterwards, while the mainstream media either didn’t have the story, or put up “BREAKING NEWS” squibs with a few sentences (which is fine, some of them were actually investigating before posting).
Unfortunately, some outlets just totally screwed the pooch with their reporting. And by “screw the pooch” I mean publishing unverified supposition in place of fact, and rushing to judgment.