Comment by teleclimber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teleclimber | Hacker News Reader

"A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which would power the Dragon V2 capsule, exploded during an Aug. 22 test flight. Musk said afterward in a Twitter post: “Rockets are tricky.”"

Am I the only one who finds this a bit misleading? That was a highly experimental version of the 9 that failed. And it failed while trying to do something no rocket this size has ever done. It seems that would be worth mentioning.

Next paragraph: "The Atlas V boosters chosen by Boeing have a flawless record launching high-priced military payloads."

...yet the google finds me this: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1222 "Two top secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) ocean surveillance spacecraft were fired into the wrong orbit June 15 when the 200-foot-tall Atlas V rocket they were riding on stopped firing too early in space following launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla."

I guess I'm not surprised the media is uninformed (or biased) but it still ticks me off enough that I feel the need to point it out.

I wondered that too. She's written 8 articles for Bloomberg and 7 of them are about Boeing - all in a positive light. Imagine she has the ear of Boeing PR.

http://www.businessweek.com/authors/2763-julie-johnsson

> Imagine she has the ear of Boeing PR.

Seems more like vice versa.

Good catch. She's in Chicago too, which is where Boeing is headquartered.

hmm shes probably on payroll.

Bloomberg is sort of a catch22 with musk. They try to highlight him as much as possible, even so far as to over praise him with really stupid matters. Then one little mistake or negativity, it is blown up and seriously investigated and written about.

It's not too surprising to see businessweek displaying a slight preference for Boeing over SpaceX, considering the former is public while the latter is private.

Investors do prefer public companies for obvious reasons.

Because its a press release and Boeing is a partner.

They didn't mention the Atlas V is built using RD-180[1] (aka Russian engines) even though much of the discussion is about not begin dependent on the Russians for access to space. Or that the expected cost per launch is not cost competitive. But the good news is that doesn't matter, what matters is how well both companies execute against the objective of a reliable manned launch capability.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V

Where did you get that this was a press release?

FTA: "To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Johnsson in Chicago at jjohnsson@bloomberg.net"

To be perfectly clear I am just assumed it was, my assumption is that Boeing issues a press release with some talking points, the reporter reads it and rephrases it in their own words and that goes out on the wire. What results are pretty much the same words and talking points in a number of stories. But looking at the 'official' release here : http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2014-09-16-Boeing-CST-100-Select... and NASA's release here: http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/nasa-chooses-americ... I could believe its just the reporter's take on the day's news

That was mentioned:

> The Atlas V boosters chosen by Boeing have a long history of launching high-priced military payloads. The challenge: The United Launch Alliance rockets rely on Russian-made RD-180 engines whose availability is threatened by tensions between the U.S. and Russia.

Has anyone contacted the author or editor? This kind of shoddy "journalism" annoys me.

I once sent a polite email to an Australian journalist who was reporting on a tech topic, which he got rather wrong.

He sent a very large, very rude and very nasty email back. I was a bit taken aback, and so I never bother anymore.

That was probably his goal. In those cases you should simply publish the conversation and keep moving.

Sam Varghese, by any chance?

Y'know, I think it might have been. I'm going to go spelunking in my old GMail account and see if I can find it, because now I'm curious.

This article is submarine PR for Boeing.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Submarine PR is when a company manufactures news out of nothing and gets the press to cover it. This contract is actually news. If this story was shaped by Boeing PR, it's just straight ahead regular PR.

Submarine PR is always news. It's not always 'manufactured'. It's just happens to be coverage that subtly puts the client in a better light.

that's just PR - PR companies wouldn't do so well if they pushed stories that showed their clients in a negative light.

The sentence does mention it was a test flight. Maybe "experimental" would have been more accurate a word than "test", but that's just arguing over details.

This sentence was not misleading and was basically stating facts.

Not really, the dev vehicle had, for example, three not nine engines and critically had only one or a particular sensor where the real thing has three; the fault that exploded the test vehicle would have been outvoted by the other two redundant systems on a real F9. Calling them the same invites inaccurate feelings of splodeyness.

It seems that quote is missing now. She might have corrected it. Good job!

Is NRO technically military?

It's part of the US Intelligence community, so it depends on your definition of the military. In practical terms, the answer is yes. It's mostly staffed from the Air Force and CIA.

The Air Force handles all US government launches except NASA's.

They are under the DoD, which is typically a good way of figuring out if an agency should be considered military.

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