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Is it just me, or are the media / journalists once again putting a stupidly unfair pessimistic spin on that SpaceX launch?

"SpaceX rocket launches but explodes shortly into flight"
"Musk's SpaceX big rocket explodes on test flight"
"SpaceX rocket explosion: None injured or killed"

They've said time and time again, it's the first test of a massively complex rocket that's bigger than anything that's ever gone before it, and success is just defined as "getting off the launch pad" and collecting data. They did that and then some.

But instead of spreading excitement about the data, the fact it launched, that it's a world first, etc. - it's all doom and gloom, implying that the whole thing was a failure and people could have died ๐Ÿ™„

And people wonder why I have a low opinion of journalists.

Comments
  • 10
    It's the media. They will make it as much of a clickbait as possible.

    For example, If you have 999 studies that drinking water doesn't cause cancer, they will not report that. If 1 study suggests water may cause cancer, you will of course see an article "Water may give you cancer".
  • 4
    @WildOrangutan It drives me nuts. Sure, teenagers on Twitter will do that, but it's literally a journalists professional responsibility to be fair and impartial. If they can't do that, especially as a specialist correspondent in the area they're reporting on - what's the point. May as well just fire them all and pull our daily news feed from Reddit.

    If the average dev did as bad a job as the average journalist then they'd never have an online platform to publish anything on anyway.
  • 4
    publishing unfair spins drives publicity. and therefore profit.

    need more to explain the phenomenon?
  • 2
    idk. so many rockets failing aint good for nature.
  • 3
    MSM journalists are cancer.

    Musk's main hope was that they didn't destroy the launchpad. He was quite pleased with the result.
  • 2
    It's because billionaire bad
  • 5
    Didn't happen with Saturn. None of Saturn program rockets, including tests, failed because NASA's approach is different. SpaceX works like USSR in the heights of space race. Rapid prototyping and launching without much static testing. Watching it last night I was reminded of N1 failures.
  • 2
    @FuckJava True, but that's mainly because SpaceX is a private company which has to be economically efficient while gov org can operate under less pressure.
    The USSRs failures were more due to their way of operation. All the higher-ups were party members and "problems" and "failures" were generally not accepted, thus were swiped under the rug, until the rug actually exploded. Just like Chernobyl: The weaknesses were known, but kept secret.
  • 0
    @ostream Management hierarchy is inherently undemocratic.
  • 1
    @PonySlaystation I think it's fair to say it's *different* pressures.

    Being publicly funded, anything that looks like a failure for Nasa (like a massive rocket blowing up) has huge implications, because it dents public confidence, which over time results in less funding (hey, why are we spending billions for these idiots to blow up rockets?!)

    Being privately funded however, SpaceX doesn't really care - they just care about producing a proven launch system as fast as possible to rake in the $$, and if they have to blow up a dozen or two rockets on the way through trial and error then who cares.
  • 1
    @PonySlaystation That's true, but Saturn was built by private companies. Granted, they held NASA by the balls as NASA had promised to beat the Ruskies to the moon before the decade was out, still, Saturn was a joint venture between Boeing, North American and Douglas, and was delivered (here I'm copy/pasting from Wikipedia as I don't have enough information myself) within project budget.

    I totally agree with what you say about USSR, just that build it cheap and rapidly is more like ะ ะพัะบะพัะผะพั.

    Regarding Chernobyl, yes it was an awful fail-prone design but at the end of the day, the disaster happened because of poor operator choices.
  • 0
    It's cool to hate on anything to do with Elon right now so the spaceX people (the ones actually doing the job) are getting the short end of the stick unfortunately
  • 0
    @ostream it's not about working hard but creating value and taking on greater responsibilities
  • 0
    im just gonna leave this here

    https://youtu.be/ErDuVomNd9M

    the channel overall gives some good scientific truths about many of Musks projects. its not all gloom how the latter tries to give the impression, hyped up by elon fanboys.
  • 0
    @Demolishun @nururururu @WildOrangutan @AlmondSauce and Musk will say it was a success to keep investors up... getting fooled by both the billionare and the media now huh
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