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A Shadowy Op-Ed Campaign Is Now Smearing SpaceX In Space Cities (arstechnica.com)
Last month when Boeing and SpaceX announced the first astronauts who will fly on their commercial crew spacecraft, several newspapers across the U.S. began publishing an op-ed that criticized the process by which Boeing competitor SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rocket. "The first op-ed appeared in a Memphis newspaper a week before the commercial crew announcement," reports Ars Technica. "In recent weeks, copies of the op-ed have also appeared in the Houston Chronicle, various Alabama newspapers, Albuquerque Journal, Florida Today, and The Washington Times." Ars Technica reports: All of these op-eds were bylined by "retired spacecraft operator" Richard Hagar, who worked for NASA during the Apollo program and now lives in Tennessee. (Based upon his limited social media postings, Hagar appears to be more interested in conservative politics than in space these days). Each op-ed cites Hagar's work on NASA's recovery from the Apollo 1 fire and the hard lessons NASA learned that day about human spaceflight. The pieces then pivot to arguing that SpaceX's load-and-go fueling process -- in which the crew will board the Dragon spacecraft on top of the Falcon 9 rocket before it is fueled -- ignores the lessons that Hagar's generation learned during Apollo.
"It's concerning to learn that some of the newer private space ventures launching today don't appreciate the same safety standards we learned to emphasize on Apollo," the op-ed states. "I suppose for Mr. Musk, inexperience is replacing the abundant safety protocols drilled into us after witnessing the Apollo 1 disaster. Astronaut safety is NASA's number one priority on any space mission. There is no reason it should not be for private space travel, but commercial space companies like SpaceX play by different rules."
There are some factual inaccuracies here. For one thing, SpaceX does play by the same rules as Boeing for commercial crew -- astronaut safety rules that NASA itself wrote. Moreover, NASA has already provisionally cleared load-and-go for Falcon 9 launches that will send the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds. In fact, based upon our research, at least four of the six op-eds that we located were submitted by two people with gmail.com addresses. Their names were Josh Brevik and Casey Murray. Further research revealed that two people with these names worked as "associates" at a Washington, DC-based public relations firm named Law Media Group or LMG. LMG's website says they are a 15-year-old firm that "develops and executes public-, Hill-, and agency-facing issue advocacy campaigns that shift the narrative in a changing world." The SourceWatch website more bluntly "calls LMG a 'secretive Washington DC public affairs firm' with a history of placing op-eds, and it seeks to mask the op-eds' financial sponsors," reports Ars.
"It's concerning to learn that some of the newer private space ventures launching today don't appreciate the same safety standards we learned to emphasize on Apollo," the op-ed states. "I suppose for Mr. Musk, inexperience is replacing the abundant safety protocols drilled into us after witnessing the Apollo 1 disaster. Astronaut safety is NASA's number one priority on any space mission. There is no reason it should not be for private space travel, but commercial space companies like SpaceX play by different rules."
There are some factual inaccuracies here. For one thing, SpaceX does play by the same rules as Boeing for commercial crew -- astronaut safety rules that NASA itself wrote. Moreover, NASA has already provisionally cleared load-and-go for Falcon 9 launches that will send the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds. In fact, based upon our research, at least four of the six op-eds that we located were submitted by two people with gmail.com addresses. Their names were Josh Brevik and Casey Murray. Further research revealed that two people with these names worked as "associates" at a Washington, DC-based public relations firm named Law Media Group or LMG. LMG's website says they are a 15-year-old firm that "develops and executes public-, Hill-, and agency-facing issue advocacy campaigns that shift the narrative in a changing world." The SourceWatch website more bluntly "calls LMG a 'secretive Washington DC public affairs firm' with a history of placing op-eds, and it seeks to mask the op-eds' financial sponsors," reports Ars.
SpaceX charges about 1/3 what everyone else does for a commercial satellite mission and is a bargain for government missions too, despite their increased paperwork. Previous to SpaceX, the United States had a horrible situation where there was a space monopoly made of Boeing and Lockheed, previous competitors who got tangled in an industrial espionage situation and merged their space business rather than have the lawsuit of the century. The US Government and citizens lost, because they ended up having an expensive monopoly and on top of it they had to pay 1 Billion per year to the monopoly to assure they'd stay in business.
So far, SpaceX looks like they have the most viable path to space. There are a lot of "old space" businesses and government agencies that can't compete, so they FUD.
In theory, a rocket that cost 3 times as much (or more than that, in the case of the Shuttle) could afford to be safer for manned missions. In practice, it hasn't been.
Bruce Perens.
The ironic thing about this post being that SpaceX does it so much cheaper than the "socialist" option, that they are literally pissing the entire launch industry around the world off. I have a good friend who works range optics at Vandenberg and knows a lot of people from the various launch teams. He says the ULA people hate SpaceX. No matter how polite they are in press etc, they hate SpaceX. When a Falcon Heavy can lift nearly double the payload of a Delta IV Heavy and do it for 1/3 the cost... yeah. I have no idea what the economics will be when BFR is up and running, but if they pull it off as envisioned, it will be even cheaper by far to lift significantly more payload. And if the idea of Earth to Earth pans out, and I really hope it does, his estimated price in an astronomical conference presentation was about the cost of a business class airline ticket. It comes down to scale and he envisions a huge scale up. They already account for a significant fraction of all annual launches globally. SpaceX has never been about being a rich mans game. He is using sort of the same model he did with Tesla where you build the expensive one and use the money generated from the sales for that to fund the next round, and repeat, getting cheaper and scaling each time. So you get a really rich guy to fund R&D and take him around the Moon. That allows you to use the money to further develop without spending your own, etc. But their end goal has always been about making spaceflight options affordable for all. Roughly as affordable as airline travel is now. I guess we'll see how it all plays out over the next decade or so, but so far he has stuck to the model and it is starting to pay off as they have a LONG waitlist of launch payloads and are ramping up production of Block 5 Falcon 9s as well as working hard to cut turn around time. They've already cut it from months to weeks. Again, stated end goal is same day relaunch.
This is why, despite potential failures with any type of fueling, you are wrong
Space Ex is only cheap because they lose money on every flight and cut corners with safety.
That's a blatant lie.
Lockheed Martin has been wasting tax money with corner cutting and failures for decades:
Just one example, and far from an isolated incident:
Investigation showed that Titan K-17, which was several years old and the last Titan IV-A to be launched, had dozens of damaged or chafed wires and should never have been launched in that operating condition, however the Air Force put extreme pressure on launch crews to meet program deadlines. The ultimate cause of the failure was an electrical short that caused a momentary power dropout to the guidance computer at T+39 seconds. After power was restored, the computer sent a spurious pitch down and yaw to the right command. At T+40 seconds, the Titan was travelling at near supersonic speed and could not handle this action without suffering a structural failure. In any case, the Titan's fuselage was filled with numerous sharp metal protrusions that made it nearly impossible to install, adjust, or remove wiring without it getting damaged. Quality control at Lockheed's Denver plant, where Titan vehicles were assembled, was described as "awful".
Here, watch for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's not what the article says. The articles says nothing on whether Hagar wrote the op-ed, it says he didn't submit all of them to the numerous newspapers that published it. Essentially he submitted it to one or two newspapers, and then this PR outfit appears to have pushed it out to other newspapers, with or without his consent.
Here's what the article says (my bolding):
He didn't submit many of the op eds - his authorship is not in question, just whether he submitted the op eds to the papers that published them. He didn't submit many of the op eds - the fact he submitted some is not in question either.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.