And lazy reporting, at Fox News, in a story about the Gehman Report, as pointed out by Matt Bille over at sci.space.policy today.

“There has been a subtle change at NASA,” physics professor Robert Park of the University of Maryland told Fox News, referring to the amount of outsourcing the agency has done in recent years.

Park said he’d been told that in the control room at the time of the accident “there were no NASA employees. It was all contractors.”

Three points.

First, why does anyone care what a physics professor at the University of Maryland says or thinks? Why automatically go to your rolodex of bombastic kneejerk opponents of the manned space program (which Professor Parks is)?

Second, “he’d been told” is not exactly great sourcing. As Matt says, why take the word of someone known to be antagonistic to NASA, rather than simply calling NASA and verifying whether or not there were NASA employees in the control room. As it reads, there is an implication that it’s true. There’s another implication, which brings us to item three.

Even if true, why is this a bad thing? Why should we assume that civil servants are more competent or responsible than contractor employees? There seems to be an implication here (entirely unjustified) that government employees are noble and have only the interests of safety and the program at heart, but they were replaced by black-hearted greedy knaves with no interest other than crashing space shuttles while fleecing the taxpayer. If that caricature is not what we’re supposed to infer, then just what is his point?

[Update at 8 PM PDT]

Jorge Frank over at sci.space.policy has an interesting URL disputing Professor Park (warning, it’s a big file–over two megs). As he says:

This is the group photo for the STS-107 Ascent/Entry team. For reference, NASA badges have a blue NASA logo on a yellow background to the left of the photo, while contractor badges have black barberpoles on both sides of the photo.