…without it being administered by imbeciles.

…without it being administered by imbeciles.

Allison Gatlin has the latest on the test explosion in Mojave. There are quotes from Jeff Foust and Brett Alexander, including this one, with which I agree:

“Because of the nature of this accident, I think that there will be limited media attention from here on out of this accident,” Foust said. “I suspect that you’ll see a lot more coverage over the next few days of NASA’s peccadilloes – intoxicated astronauts and sabotaged computers – than you will of this accident. As a result, this is going to be out of the general public’s minds pretty quickly, outside of those directly affected by the accident.”

It’s ironic and amusing that NASA’s latest foibles may knock the biggest accident to affect NewSpace off the headlines, but I think he’s right.

[Update in the evening]

Aaaarrrgghhh…

This is one of my biggest pet peeves:

“Today, as we are focused on the human side of this mishap we can’t loose sight of what it is we choose to do and to whom we serve,” airport General Manager Stu Witt said Friday.

It’s bad enough when people do it on unedited internet fora, but you’d think that professional editors and reporters could get it right. I wonder if it’s going to become the accepted spelling, because we can no longer hold back the tide of ignorance?

And yes, I know it’s confusing, as demonstrated a few grafs later:

“Our nation enjoys the safest transportation system the world has known, largely because people like the ones who populate the companies engaged in systems research and testing at Mojave, Edwards and China Lake choose this location to practice their craft,” Witt said.

Same pronunciation, different spelling. Yes, English has idiosyncratic spelling conventions. But again, professional writers and editors are paid to know the difference.

When I saw Glenn Reynolds in Dallas at the ISDC in May, he mentioned to me that he’d been reading a review copy of Rocketeers on the airplane, to prepare for a review he was going to write for the Wall Street Journal in conjunction with its release. Well, he was (as usual) true to his word (subscription only, though). As Clark Lindsey notes, the Powerline guys have an excerpt for the subscription challenged.

I haven’t said anything about the “drunk astronauts” story, but I do think that it epitomizes the atrocious state of reporting on space (and any technical subject), in which it becomes sensationalized and drained of reality. Everyone assumes that the two incidents referred to were Shuttle launches, when the word I get is that it was a T-38 and a Soyuz flight. And of course it has become inflated from two (anecdotal) incidents to everyone doing shooters before each Shuttle flight. The real story, as Jim Oberg points out in this interview with a terminally clueless BBC reporter, is the special treatment of astronauts, and the (lack of sufficient) power of the flight surgeons (at least in their minds) to ground them. Of course, this is a tough problem, as we saw in the Nowak case.

There is a natural antipathy between the astronauts and the flight surgeons. From an astronaut’s point of view, an encounter with the latter can’t have a good outcome. At best, it can be a neutral one. The default is that one’s flight readiness is go. A flight surgeon can’t improve that–they can only change it for the worse. If one is sick enough to need to get permission to go, it’s unlikely to happen, since there are many trained backups, even for a given mission, who are fine. Recall Apollo XIII, when Ken Mattingly had to be replaced by Jack Swigert because he had merely been exposed to German measles, due to concern that he might come down with it during the mission. He ended up not getting them, and while the decision made sense, he had to feel frustrated (though obviously not as much as he would have had the mission been successful).

It’s not a new problem, and it’s not one likely to go away, but it would help if the media would treat it seriously. Not to mention soberly.