Also, if somebody is fan of spaceflight because Spacex and not before, means they aren't really fans of spaceflight.
Rovers and landers on Mars was already happening. Much more interesting than a cargo mission to ISS or a stage landing. Can watch videos of DC-X to see something similar.
I'm not sure that's fair to say Jim. It also happens to be an attitude regularly ascribed to musical "hipsters", people who look down upon other fans of their favorite performer because they only became fans after a surge in popularity. Think of spaceflight as the band and SpaceX as their new hit single.
Spacex Q score is higher that ULA or OSC's.
Quote from: sittingduck on 07/02/2015 05:09 pmI'm not sure that's fair to say Jim. It also happens to be an attitude regularly ascribed to musical "hipsters", people who look down upon other fans of their favorite performer because they only became fans after a surge in popularity. Think of spaceflight as the band and SpaceX as their new hit single. That is usually when the bands go downhill. They were better when they were lean and mean. I will fully admit I am a band snob (hipster has a different connotation for me). I lost interest in many bands when they went mainstream.
"band snob" Is a term used by exactly 5 people, all of them hipsters.
Data on Google Ngram viewer shows that as of 2008, SpaceX had not achieved a popularity above the use of the word FORTRAN. Very likely SpaceX is more frequently used in 2015.
I am too old to be a hipster, not to mention that it wasn't my type of lifestyle. The 70's Show described my adolescence closely and I lived in LA in the 80's and was more into metal and hair band scene but without the hair (I was in the USAF)
Ok we can rail against technical illiteracy and innumeracy media, the government, the public, but it is within our power to do something about it too. As was done with the crowd sourced video repair, we could, as a group use NSF to co-ordinate a campaign to provide mainstream media with a more accurate picture of what is going on. This would have to be done without rancour or derision. It needs to be done in 3 different streams for main stream media: 1) corrections to the authors and editorial staff of articles, this must be diplomatic but firm, and it must be as full of fact as possible and carefully constructed to be readable and understandable based on the level of writing of the original article; 2) to the management of the particular media outlet, less priority on detail and diplomacy, high level of writing skills, high level of urgency on the accuracy needed; 3) wherever a media outlet allows comments careful presentation of accurate data in the comments, here diplomacy with respect to the original articles author, and diplomatic but firm responses to the others commenting, exceptional language skills and simple but technically accurate corrections that are neither overly verbose or terse.There are a few reasons this should be a co-ordinated effort, besides keeping from wasting effort we could in fact work on sharing writing resources however the major reason is to achieve an even coverage of the media outlets instead of overwhelming some (which might even work against our purposes making them think their misinformation was more popular than accurate information) and skipping others.
And I don't buy the Mars in mine or anybody's lifetime.