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.
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 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 able to use passing as part of their witless coverage, as a beard for unwarranted speculation. 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.
Update: I see that even National Geographic got this point wrong, too. They still have NASA “blowing up the rocket”, even though it’s clear from most other stories that Orbital Sciences Corporation had a range safety responsibility to destroy the missile in order to avoid damage to nearby areas. Why is this so hard to get right?
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 Newsdesk 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. Don’t get me wrong: critical review by the experts is absolutely necessary. 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. Their version of “critical review” is “bash the program before the bodies are brought in for burial, regardless of who it hurts.”
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.
Thank you for writing this Carolyn.
It very badly needed saying, and I share your anger.
The coverage has indeed been despicable.
Alas, what little authentic journalism and science writing/reporting there remains gets clobbered by the tsunami of inanity and idiocy events like this unleash in the breathless infotainment culture. The fake-news circus primed by last Tuesday’s Orbital Science’s mishap has become insufferably amplified with today’s tragedy. They have accomplished the only thing they do well: drowning out reason in an orgy of hype.
I echo your question and expand on it on a particular: Why are there so precious few science or technology-literate REPORTERS and ANCHORS employed to deliver news by engaging a listening audience by SPEAKING?
Where the hell are the Cronkites?
(Another related issue, which I think is equally important but which I will not belabor here beyond mention, is the consequence of adopting the worst aspects and excesses of dumb-downing infotainment practices in public outreach campaigns, which in my opinion has ironically backfired into a major disaster, emplacing terrible habits of conformity that substantially erodes our ability to tackle the real and serious challenges of educating and informing the public – but that’s an issue best concentrated on some other time).
Its also high time that people in all the related science and tech industries that deal with space exploration and science, research and development, Earth monitoring, communications, navigation and commercial services drop their polite tolerance and silence, quit treating the fake journalists and puppets we call ‘politicians’ obeying their wealthy propaganda masters with kid gloves and call them out on their ignorance and misinformation-mongering…
The point you raise with the ridiculous “money spent on space is wasted” meme, in particular. That. Spot on. Here’s a factoid for the inexcusably dense: ALL money spent on space-related activities is spent on Earth, by people for people, and well spent it is. In fact, it is difficult to find examples that have delivered a higher and more durable return on the investment. Even endeavors deemed unrelated to the aerospace industry or space operations (say, for example, in the health and medical field, or agriculture, and yes, even the computer industry, the stock market and our precious internet that gives everyone a voice and an irrational impulse to contribute toward the rising din of madness) have come to crucially rely on the technology which aerospace research, communications and navigation services have made possible. It is an execrable deceit to keep insisting that the money spent vanishes, somehow, as if swallowed by the vacuum of space.
Without exploring our limits we cannot expect to advance. Those pilots understood that, and were willing risk their lives in the adventure of probing a little bit farther into the frontier, blazing a trail through a hostile environment to make it easier and safer for us to negotiate and profit by one day. Those who carry contrary opinions evidently have a great deal of difficulty understanding anything – and can’t even summon up the rudimentary guts to admit they are wrong when confronted by the facts. The latter produce nothing but bleak, dark futures not worth living in.
Thanks, Adolph. I’m already getting blowback in private email from arrogant little neckbeards posing as “writers” who think their ironically hip version of events is the only one worth recounting. Sorry. Neckbeardism doesn’t equal technically excellent review and investigation. That’s the way we find out how things work in the universe. Not by uninformed writers infused with word love. There’s a time when you wait for events to stop so you can evaluate. You don’t do it while people are still recovering a body from the desert, or before any kind of data are available for review. That’s just crazy, but in some circles of “journalism” it passes for normal.
Wow. Spacewriter thanks for the original piece and Adolph thanks for the intelligent follow-up. This is the most sensible thing I’ve read on this all day.
Wouldn’t it be great if our great, free, irresponsible and lazy press would encourage this sort of discussion rather than whether Justin Bieber will cancel his ticket? They won’t, of course.
But as long as people like you keep writing bits like this there will be people out there, like me, who appreciate it.
Thank you for the kind words. I am not opposed to sober reflection on causes and larger economic and political concerns of such mishaps. But, the articles I refer to were NOT that. They were clickbait platforms for people to sound off without thinking about what they were saying. It takes very little deep thinking to rip someone a new one while a pilot’s body still lay in the wreckage, just so a “writer” could blather on about the wealthy or whatever. THAT stuff could have waited. Now that the facts are starting to emerge from the investigation, we probably won’t hear from the hip, sardonic crowd at Wired about this again. They will have moved their journalistic ambulance-chasing to a new accident somewhere.
@ Duncan: thank you, and agreed: Carolyn lays it out splendidly in no uncertain terms.
@ Carolyn:
OT, but germane to what was alluded to earlier as an aspect of The Problem…if we can at all push forward on the memory of a pioneer who would no doubt have welcomed such discourse as positively relevant, however peripheral to his demise, dare I say?…yes, absolutely, in his honor:
[From the just-released email issued by NASA Science News]:
” “How hard is this landing?” asks Art Chmielewski, the US Rosetta Project Manager at JPL. “Consider this: The comet will be moving 40 times faster than a speeding bullet, spinning, shooting out gas and welcoming Rosetta on the surface with boulders, cracks, scarps and possibly meters of dust!” ”
See what I mean?
Its beyond embarrassing. Absolutely nuts to give the public – especially kids who we are supposed to excite with accurate information – the extravagantly erroneous idea that the comet has such a speed without the slightest proviso that the actual speed involved with respect to the spacecraft upon release of the Philae lander is similar to a walking pace, which ironically would present a spectacularly interesting FACT which is far more intriguing to kids trying to understand what’s actually going on there! No correction supplied of course – its just word candy, courtesy, typical-issue public outreach overwhelm.
Maybe NASA ought to start distributing Ritalin for everybody who reads their releases.
Looking forward to a properly pithy analysis of this preposterous tendency in a devoted post from you on this some time in the future, as I am convinced you can! 😉
Adolph,
You have NO idea how many times I’ve figuratively gnashed my teeth at aome of the factual corner-cutting I have seen in some NASA press releases. (I can’t do literal gnashing; my dentist would be retired to the Bahamas by now if I did 😉 ). I’ll have to focus on this one next time I write about the upcoming landing — fairly soon now, since the landing attempt is next week!
Carolyn