Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

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I'd be interested to know who the unnamed sources that fed the false narrative to Bloomberg and the WSJ about it being a SpaceX problem were. (I think those were the originating news organizations, but I may be remembering that wrong.)

This was a month before the Falcon Heavy launch which had a reasonable chance of a spectacular failure. Priming the public to think of SpaceX as a satellite destroyer and then a high profile failure would have been fantastic for United Launch Alliance.

I think it was pretty clear that SpaceX's customers didn't believe it as a SpaceX problem. Subsequent launches were not delayed pending investigation as they were for legitimate failures.

Or maybe it was just sloppy reporting from some guy shooting off his mouth.

The Wall Street Journal’s rocket reporter, Andy Pasztor [1], has had an anti-commercial space bias since as far back as I can remember. His sources appear to be Boeing and Lockheed Martin company men. His reporting echoes their world views, inaccuracies and all.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/news/author/1472

Plus take the fact that Lockheed/Boeing/ULA are public and SpaceX is not. Take the fall long and public enough that by the time the market would adjust their pricing it's largely been forgotten.

Yep, even before I saw your comment I guessed that the initial SpaceX hit-piece was written by Andy Pasztor.

Looking through the recent Wall Street Journal A. Pasztor headlines that you've linked to, it seems Northrop Grumman has also been having production issues with the James Webb Space Telescope satellite. Upon further search, I haven't yet seen any articles claiming that the issues are technical mistakes, only that they were "avoidable".

Not a great PR month for NG.

The most recent GAO report (for which Northrop resisted requests to interview project staff[0]), blamed Northrop in part for the delays, citing “a manufacturing error and manufacturing process mistakes.”[1]

[0] http://spacenews.com/northrop-balks-at-agencys-request-to-in...

[1] http://spacenews.com/northrop-balks-at-agencys-request-to-in...

This is how all journalism works, but Gell-Mann amnesia keeps us from realizing.

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