Perhaps it is natural for an engineer to get irked when the press describes a thousand dollars worth of latex and helium, which only did 30km, and had no orbita

Perhaps it is natural for an engineer to get irked when the press describes a thousand dollars worth of latex and helium, which only did 30km, and had no orbital velocity at all, as a "spacecraft". It was a "spacecraft" in the same way a cameraphone is a "workstation", or BASIC is a production language.