Ward Words

Recently it seems that the media has been really down on NASA. The whole Lisa Nowak story and drunk astronaut story didn't help. Then talk radio and editorial boards jumped on the bandwagon. Why do we spend so much on space exploration when that money can be spent here on the ground in the US? A brief but good article can be found here (via NASA Watch).

I tend to think that the railing about NASA says something about the lack of journalistic standards/ethics and even more about the state of science education in the US. Consider the op/ed piece written in the Houston Chronicle here (Johnson Space Center director Mike Coats' response is here). In particular read through the comment section. You see, the Chronicle piece attributed an explosion the killed two people to NASA, when in reality the responsible party was Scaled Composites, a private NASA competitor. The irony pointed out by a commenter is that perfection is demanded of the world's most complicated machine and those who work on it, yet fact checking a simple opinion article is beyond the scope of the author's duty. It should be noted that the offending bullet point has since been removed from the article, though no retraction was issued that I know of. The op/ed also criticized the alcohol story, which now appears to be without merit. You might not know that, because even though the drunk astronaut headlines were splashed across websites, papers, and television for several days, when a report found no evidence of boozing astronauts was released this week, you hardly heard about it.

It's also not just people with a forum espousing their ill informed opinions. Check out this article posted on Yahoo! news, which contains this line:

The only moon landing in history is NASA's Apollo expedition in 1968.

I don't even know what to say about this.

How does such terrible science reporting get printed? I sense that it is directly linked to the science education of our country. At the university level, our schools are educating more and more foreign students and less and less Americans. I've done no research on the theories, but why do you think this is? What are America's potential scientists and engineers studying?

I'll end by saying that we could use some more journalists with science/engineering backgrounds. Is there a track for that at journalism schools? How can it be encouraged? I do believe that it would be easier for a scientist to become a writer, than vice versa.