Another Zimmerman op-ed today at PJ Media
Our mindless propaganda press
PJ Media tonight posted another op-ed by yours truly:
My readers know I strongly oppose flying this mission manned because of questions about Orion’s heat shield and its untested life support system. In this op-ed however my purpose was not to argue this point again. Instead, I wanted to take our bankrupt media to task for their utter failure to report these facts.
When NASA this past week rolled SLS/Orion to the launchpad, I was appalled by the coverage. In reviewing every article I could find about that rollout, it seemed I was “reading the state-run presses of China and the Soviet Union”, not a free independent press charged with covering the news.
The write-up of every one of these so-called news outlets is cloying and worshipful. The worst examples are those that focus on the ridiculous quote by one astronaut, “We are very likely going to see things that no human eye has ever seen.” This may be true (four humans will see the Moon from a new perspective), but it is hyperbole of the worst sort. Not only have humans circled the Moon before, but unmanned orbiters have also mapped the entire globe at a resolution far better than anything that will be visible to the Artemis-II crew.
Furthermore, these media reports repeat without any questioning NASA’s very false claim that it has done everything possible to make sure this flight is safe.
Only one article out of almost 20 news outlets mentioned Orion’s questionable heat shield, and that article made it seem as if NASA had fixed the problem. None of the articles even mentioned the fact that Orion’s life support system will be flying in space for the very first time, essentially using four human beings as guinea pigs.
Instead, every article was a propaganda piece extolling mindlessly the wonders of NASA and this mission, making believe all was perfect and well planned.
This is bad journalism of the worst sort. If you are going to report on this mission, good journalism requires you to at least note these issues. In fact, good journalism demands it, because it actually makes for a much better story: NASA is sending four astronauts around the Moon in a capsule with questionable engineering!
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Our mindless propaganda press
PJ Media tonight posted another op-ed by yours truly:
My readers know I strongly oppose flying this mission manned because of questions about Orion’s heat shield and its untested life support system. In this op-ed however my purpose was not to argue this point again. Instead, I wanted to take our bankrupt media to task for their utter failure to report these facts.
When NASA this past week rolled SLS/Orion to the launchpad, I was appalled by the coverage. In reviewing every article I could find about that rollout, it seemed I was “reading the state-run presses of China and the Soviet Union”, not a free independent press charged with covering the news.
The write-up of every one of these so-called news outlets is cloying and worshipful. The worst examples are those that focus on the ridiculous quote by one astronaut, “We are very likely going to see things that no human eye has ever seen.” This may be true (four humans will see the Moon from a new perspective), but it is hyperbole of the worst sort. Not only have humans circled the Moon before, but unmanned orbiters have also mapped the entire globe at a resolution far better than anything that will be visible to the Artemis-II crew.
Furthermore, these media reports repeat without any questioning NASA’s very false claim that it has done everything possible to make sure this flight is safe.
Only one article out of almost 20 news outlets mentioned Orion’s questionable heat shield, and that article made it seem as if NASA had fixed the problem. None of the articles even mentioned the fact that Orion’s life support system will be flying in space for the very first time, essentially using four human beings as guinea pigs.
Instead, every article was a propaganda piece extolling mindlessly the wonders of NASA and this mission, making believe all was perfect and well planned.
This is bad journalism of the worst sort. If you are going to report on this mission, good journalism requires you to at least note these issues. In fact, good journalism demands it, because it actually makes for a much better story: NASA is sending four astronauts around the Moon in a capsule with questionable engineering!
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Yes, America’s “schools of journalism” have turned out remarkably shoddy graduates, and the media businesses that hire them reflect even more-shoddy standards! It is one of the reason I predicted that Musk’s purchase of Twitter would likely set off a causal chain in these “circles” and institutions, that amounted to an extinction event! The impact of a journalistic asteroid that wipes out existing life forms!
Sadly, this is the first I’ve heard that the life support system is untested in space.
I’m curious to learn about this system. How does it work? How id it different from legacy life support systems?
Can you point me to anything?
“We are very likely going to see things that no human eye has ever seen.”
–>Probably, a bunch of dead astronauts.
The legacy media pretty much don’t employ any real subject matter experts on their reporting staffs anymore. I think covering space stuff is pretty much a short-straw draw for some luckless staffer at most such outlets. The questions I’ve heard such people ask at NASA pressers are cringe-inducing. No J-school graduate emerges knowing anything about math or science these days – except whatever twaddle happens to comprise “The Narrative.” The legacy media employ fools because fools are cheaper to hire and much of legacy media’s advertising base has long-since departed for the Web. With remarkably few exceptions, the only good space reporters out there are working for websites these days, not TV networks, newspapers or magazines.
I suppose it is not a surprise that the only two space journalists who seem to have reported at any length on the heat shield story were the two guys who were in that meeting in Houston.
Interestingly, Jeff Foust went out of his way to highlight Camarda’s LinkedIn essay in a tweet on X, responding directly to Jared Isaacman. But that attentiveness doesn’t seem to have made it into his Space News articles on Artemis II this month. I have no idea why.
P.S. I am prescinding from all of Philip Sloss’s reporting, since he covers literally everything about SLS and Orion from top to bottom. But I fear that hardly anyone pays him attention unless they’re hard core rocket nerds. Sadly he’s yet to hit 10,000 subscribers on Youtube.
Dick Eagleson: Except the space media sites were as bad as the legacy media on this story. They have no excuse.
This beast is so expensive to launch that one essentially cannot afford to test it adequately on NASA’s current budget. If SLS could launch every month and a new Orion be built every few months, there is no way they would even consider this. Nobody is allowed to admit it even to themselves, but that is the true reasoning behind the decision. We all say safety first but in reality cost and schedule WILL ALWAYS influence how much risk one is willing to accept. Affordability leads to safety.
Cloudy commented:” Affordability leads to safety.”
Which is a riff on “Only rich societies can afford Progressivism”.
Robert Zimmerman,
Yeah, the purely space sites are pretty bad because they are, in essence, trade publications and have a fairly limited advertiser base that they must keep happy. Some of the biggest advertisers on such sites are, of course, those OldSpace contractors who are the principal beneficiaries of the SLS and Orion programs. The “excuse” of these sites for all of the uncritical cheerleading for SLS-Orion is that they have financial knives at their throats.
Two of the best space journalists work for web-based entities that cover space, but also other things – Eric Berger at Ars Technica and Loren Grush at Bloomberg. That appears to allow them quite a bit more leeway to butcher and roast cows that are sacred at other, more narrowly space-oriented, outlets.
Cloudy,
You have hit the target dead center of the 10-ring.
The glacial production cadence of SLS and Orion, combined with their obscene unit costs, pretty much eliminate any chance of doing proper testing. SpaceX didn’t start testing Starship until six months after Artemis 1, but has conducted 11 test flights since and just might manage a 12th before Artemis 2 flies. That’s the difference between an exercise in collecting as much government money as possible and developing an actual industrial product, primarily for one’s own use, at the lowest cost and fastest pace possible.
From Robert‘s linked article:
Apollo 7 spent ten days checking out the Apollo spacecraft with men aboard, including a checkout of the life support system with actual human beings, in a safe orbit that could be minutes or a few hours from a safe reentry if something went horribly wrong.
From what I understand, Artemis II will spend two days in a highly elliptical 23½-hour Earth orbit performing the spacecraft checkout before firing the engines to go to the Moon for its once-around flyby. Can they really do ten days of checkouts in two days? If something does go wrong during this time then it can be an entire day before they can reenter the atmosphere to safety.
It isn’t even a repeat of Apollo 8, because the Orion service module does not have the fuel to get it into lunar orbit, like Apollo 8 did.
I believe that it is important for the public to know that there is a higher risk on this flight than with Apollo. If something goes horribly wrong, the public should not be as surprised as it was with Columbia, in which NASA was aware that the reentry was riskier than previous flights but didn’t make the danger widely known.
_______________
Cloudy wrote: “This beast is so expensive to launch that one essentially cannot afford to test it adequately on NASA’s current budget.”
That means that the planning was poor when creating Artemis. The existing rocket was insufficient for the mission and the existing spacecraft was insufficient for the mission, so we have a barely-tested mission that is more risky than necessary and more risky than we flew before. What are the rewards? Not much. What are the consequences of disaster? Congressional inquiries, because the public was not prepared for the risks being taken.
Will Artemis be cancelled if there is disaster? Probably. So far, the U.S. has not lost a crew on an early flight, much less the first manned flight. A disaster on the first flight will remove any confidence anyone had in Orion or SLS, depending upon which has the disaster. Would NASA survive a disaster? Maybe, but its reputation probably won’t.
Meanwhile, commercial space has alternate manned spacecraft to use for the nation to get Americans into space.
Edward noted: “Can they really do ten days of checkouts in two days?”
Maybe they don’t have to. Orion looks a lot like Apollo-based architecture. We have been doing that for some sixty years. We should have it down. Well, except maybe the heat shield. And environmental systems. And probably some other things.
Apollo 4 & 6 Test Flights
https://youtu.be/KTqe7lz7aEM
25:53
“First Ten Seconds After Liftoff”
When Saturn V was Most Vulnerable
Apollo11space (December 2025)
https://youtu.be/nTlMCzWxVRk
20:36