Boeing could fund Op-Ed campaign by attacking SpaceX across the country

Companies like Boeing and SpaceX could collaborate with NASA to bring Americans back into space in rockets and crewed ships of our own design. Companies are competitors and not partners. They are fighting over some of the most lucrative and important contracts of the 21st century. They are not friends either, which has been reported by accusations that Boeing has funded a series of editorial attacks against SpaceX in newspapers across the country.

From July, a series of identical or almost identical editorials written by a Richard Hagar began to appear in various publications, including Washington Times, Florida Today, Albuquerque Journal, the Houston Chronicle, and USA today, as details Ars Technica. Hagar, who worked for NASA at the time of Apollo, says NASA ignores the safety lessons that she should have learned during the Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo I disaster by allowing SpaceX to use a "load and go" power-up procedure that loads astronauts into the capsule before refueling. It is true that SpaceX has lost an unmanned rocket using this fuel system, but NASA has provisionally certified the launch system of the company – and it is not Musk who has written the rules of this process. Yet, the editorial says:

I guess for Mr. Musk, inexperience replaces the many security protocols that were imposed upon us after the Apollo 1 disaster. Astronaut safety is NASA's number one priority for any space mission. There is no reason why it should not be for private space travel, but commercial space companies like SpaceX follow different rules.

Elon Musk does not write the rules for the safety of astronauts. NASA requires companies that want to customize their vehicles to meet NASA standards, not the other way around. But the rostrum is only the first part of the story. Once Ars contacted the original author, they realized that he had only submitted it to two of the six articles that wore it. The other four submissions were submitted by individuals affiliated with Law Media Group, a public relations firm in DC who had previously published editorials in newspapers without revealing that they had been written on behalf of professional clients. And Boeing is first on LMG's list of "featured narrations," although the story is about aircraft, not spacecraft. Ars was not able to contact the CEO of LMG, but the editors of the publications who published the editorials confirmed that they were unaware of any potential involvement of the company. # 39; company.

Boeing declined to comment on the issue or any potential involvement with LMG, but we know that the company has already run into SpaceX on the question of which of them would be the first to place humans on Mars . It is important to ask which NASA companies work with NASA to return to space, how to spend the funds, and what approaches work best to keep astronauts safe while continuing our exploration of the sky. But it is precisely because these decisions are so serious that we must remain vigilant to take them. The Broadside corporate attacks aimed at influencing the public opinion based on inaccurate arguments as to who decides when a commercial crew carrier has met the security requirements are not the way to ensure the success of US space exploration.

Now read: Challenger, Columbia and the lies we tell ourselves, how a wave of support to readers has released a 30-year-old Challenger engineer's guilt, and NASA agrees to allow astronauts to board aboard. a SpaceX rocket during a refueling