Which brings me to the topic at hand: Just how badly has public media, through misunderstanding the topic themselves, distorted the view that Joe Average has of SpaceX?
Of SpaceX? How about of *everything*?
BBC news and the Jerusalem Post are fairly accurate.
how badly the mainstream media understands spacex
My son heard it and said he only hears of failures
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.
Quote from: nadreck on 07/01/2015 04:09 pmOk 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. Or favoritism. There are many organizations and companies involved in spaceflight. Just like pop music tends to over shadows other good and relevant musicians, there is no need to focus on current "pop" company exclusively.**I have a had a distain for pop radio/music, going back to my teens. AOR was my choice. I bought LP and cassettes and not 45's and 8 tracks. I got my first CD player in 83. My current choice is ripping concert DVD/Blurays.
Average Joe really doesn't keep up with spaceflight. On another note, the business news do not like Elon Musk. They tell people not to invest in Tesla for instance. Musk throws all the profits back into the business, but most investors are not in the market for the long run, only the short run. They like it when SpaceX can't land on their ship. They know eventually SpaceX will go public and offer stock. They think it will be just like Tesla, and not turn a profit. So, that leaves companies like Google investing in SpaceX but not the large financials. SpaceX will work out this problem. Just like any other company such as Orbital, ULA, Boeing, or Lockheed. They need the revenue from satellite launches and NASA supply missions if they are to achieve their goal of the BFR and MCT. I'm surprised ULA never tried to retrieve the old Atlas II booster engines that drop off. Now because of SpaceX they are going to try with Vulcan. Hope they succeed in spite of congress. Hope both SpaceX and ULA succeed because we need lower cost space flight to increase human presence in space.
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: