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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.
Funding for the weed is secured
Let NASA do the stuff they're good at.
Let them just be the boffins, thinking shit up, trying stuff out. Don't push them to build rockets, it just ends up with parts spread all over the country in various states.
Let them focus on research (or sprinkling funds around to various outside parties for research, spaceX included), deep space exploration, and the tech to help enable that. They can be the enablers for so many things if they're allowed to be.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
No, some PR firms writing and publishing articles under the name of someone who might actually know something.
RTFS: "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"
All of this, despite the fact NASA are signing off on the procedures of both Boeing and SpaceX, which are both going to use "load-and-go".
I'm curious as to why you think that manning and then fuelling/launching is worse than the other way around.
In SpaceX's case, you put the people into an empty and generally inert rocket, strap them in, turn on the launch escape system, get everyone else back to the bunker, then fuel it up and launch. In NASA's case, they fuelled the rocket, then, while a whole bunch of simmering cryogenic liquids and fuel was just sitting there, a bunch of people approached the rocket and strapped everyone in over the course of half an hour or so, then everyone left and they launched the rocket.
Problem with SpaceX rocket pre-launch? Nobody else is around to worry about, so the Astronauts (or computer) activates launch escape sequence and you're 1500ft away from the rest of the rocket in seconds.
Problem with NASA rocket? Either it goes boom during fuelling and nobody gets hurt, or something happens and half-a-dozen people have to slowly egress from the tower (as in, over the course of 10-15 seconds best case, minutes worst-case if you're strapping an astronaut in) all the while hundreds of tons of LOX and fuel is partying it out right next to them.
So - in my opinion - the SpaceX approach expects failures and has a better way of handling them, while the NASA approach reduced the chance of failures with a poor way of handling them. In general, with risk x consequence and all that, the long-term actual cost in human lives might wind up the same.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
What's so farfetched about SpaceX's competitors hiring a firm to conduct a PR campaign? There are firms that offer such services because there's a market for it. Talk up your client's company or spread FUD about their competition. You see it all the time in big ticket defense contracting.
The only thing that's a bit melodramatic is calling it "shadowy" or regarding it as somehow especially dirty pool.
Voters in places with a lot of space jobs are important political constituencies for space contractors,
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It is sad that America has extremists like these.
Elon is not only changing America, but the world, to being better. I suspect that every nation on this planet would LOVE to have elon and his companies move there.
The fact is, that Tesla and SpaceX have made massive changes to our society.
In the next 5 years, DECENT EVs will costs 10-15K. Yes, EVs, once batteries are developed, will be much cheaper than ICE.
Then we have SpaceX forcing the price of launches way down. America was out of the industry. Now, we are the industry.
However, Musk will continue to force this down further and make it economically possible to go to the moon, and mars.
And yet, we see so much trash ripping into these companies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It was never about Tesla. The SEC is going after his ass because of SpaceX being a threat to the political class that's in bed with all those government contractors (his competitors).
There is a constituency of businesses disrupted by Musk who don't mind using social engineering to attack all things Musk and pollute the mindspace with their propaganda, or buying Congressmen to oppose his efforts. As we learned from the Manafort drama, such work has highly paid experts eager to receive that deposit into their offshore accounts.
But this is Musk's game too. He has skills in this regard or such FUD would have killed his prospects already years ago. He's taking on Boeing, Ford, GM, Fossil fuels (Saudi, BP, Exxon), nuclear power, etc. And all the nations with launch business (Russia, China, India, etc). His enemies list is pretty much the Fortune 500 and every country on Earth. If he goes missing the police are going to have a harder time finding non-suspects than suspects.
And he's fine with that. It's all going to plan. He knew when he set out to save his species from extinction that his works were not going to be popular, or they would not be necessary. We are more 100x more predisposed to extinction than the dinosaurs were, as they made it 100 million years and we seem unlikely to crack the million years mark.
What's remarkable to me is how much he seems to be enjoying making fools of them all. Stoking their ire and poking the bear as if building a self sustaining colony on another planet was insufficiently challenging and he wanted to inspire the opposition to step up their game.
I don't know why he has a problem with the short sellers. A short sale is a gamble that his stock will go down, which cannot possibly exist unless there is a counter party willing to take the other side of that bet and put their money on his stock going up. Many people who believe he cannot possibly fail buy stock in his companies and then rent out their shares to his naysayers and use the money they earn in that way to buy more shares. The long and short interest in Musk stocks is a self-reinforcing commitment to volatility against a predictable trend. Long and short sellers are gambling on whether they can predict the direction of motion and attracted because he is generating a lot of motion (volatility). They are drawn like moths to his flame for no other reason than that he is succeeding in being disruptive and controversial - which are primary goals of his. It's probably an ego thing he hasn't considered: for every stupid person willing to offer their money to bet against him there is a smart person willing to take that bet, and so there is balance in the bets that moves money from the stupid to the smart and he is the conveyor belt.
Hubris is a sin and he's guilty it. I can hope there is no human living who can make him do penance for this sin because that would be the end of Mankind. If he fails to deliver an interplanetary human species there will be no other, more capable human to repeat the attempt. And that means that eventually the last of my offsprings' heirs will die without issue, my genome will become dust as yours will, all the history struggles art and works of Men throughout all time will come to nought as the passage of time erases all evidence that we ever did exist.
/My first /. post in 4 years. Things have changed around here, so be gentle.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The cost difference is actually really simple to explain - just ask anyone who ever worked in or around government procurement (as I have). It's simply bureaucracy. The government employs an army of bureaucrats, who justify their existence (and their little empires) by imposing insane paperwork requirements on contractors. So the contractors have to employ their own army of paper-pushers to deal with those requirements. Essentially none of this has anything to do with actually getting work done.
I remember one memorable situation: We (I was on the government side) had put out a small project for bid. A small company, expert in the field, came in with an offer at about 1/3 the cost of the next best offer. The thing was: they had never before had a government contract. My boss took the CEO out for coffee, discovered that he really had no idea what things were going to be like. My boss quietly told him to double his bid, to pay for all the people he would have to hire to deal with all the crap.
For larger projects, you then get the political aspects. The prime contractor must hire subcontractors, even if the prime contractor could do the work. This massively increases overhead costs yet again, but it is essential for two reasons: it distributes the financial gains among the political districts of the relevant Congresscritters - the subcontractors, of course, donate a portion of the largess to political campaigns. And second, political correctness: a certain portion of the subcontractors must be owned by people of the right minorities. Sometimes these subcontractors are only shells (with overheads, of course) that pass the actual work on to sub-subcontractors.
That's why ULA is expensive. I'm sure SpaceX has to play at least some of the same games, but obviously a lot less so.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
It's not syndication, Ars Technica was able to track down who submitted it to various newspapers, and instead of finding the papers themselves or a syndication outfit, found instead both the original author (for one or two), and a lobbying company.
It's interesting, but this is the way things work these days. As someone who's provided so much ammunition to anti-train groups who lobby using his bullshit arguments behind the scenes, it's nice to see Musk on the other end for once.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.