8 ms·

A shadowy op-ed campaign is now smearing SpaceX in space cities

208 points by frutiger 8y ago

thrower123 8y ago
Musk seems to attract so, so many tinfoil hat type conspiracy theories. He's veering into being almost a Hank Rearden caricature. EDIT: The tinfoil bit was over the top, but he's such a lightning rod and attracts so much criticism and persecution from the entrenched interests he is trying to disrupt, that it starts to look like there is some shadowy cabal trying to bring him down. I rather like the guy, we need some level of technological optimism to counteract the gloom and doom that is ever present.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  "Boeing often employs PR firms against their competitors" is hardly a conspiracy theory.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    However, Boeing is not the only entity whose lunch SpaceX is threatening to eat. Wonder if other could be involved.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      Well, if you read the article, it traces back the op-eds to the people submitting them, who work for a PR firm, which has Boeing highlighted as one of their three big case studies on their website.
- codeulike 8y ago
  A tin-foil hat isn't really required, you just need to RTFA: An article critical of SpaceX has been repeatedly submitted to (and published in) 4 newspapers by a PR group called LMG who list Boeing as one of their major customers. Boeing are SpaceX's only competitor in the commercial crew area.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - octorian 8y ago
    Yet I somehow feel like the whole Commercial Crew contract wouldn't even exist had SpaceX not paved the way. Other space launch activities, however, have been getting their lunch eaten by SpaceX. This is probably pissing off everyone who was comfortable with the old approach, not just Boeing.
- tomp 8y ago
  Is the accusation of something being a "conspiracy theory" still a valid dismissal after Snowden?
  - kazagistar 8y ago
    Or it was never a valid criticism on its own, but rather a shorthand to explain a toxic behavior pattern by certain people who would seek out all kinds of unsubtantiated nonsense regardless of merit (Lizard People, Illuminati, Social Marxism, etc). It's unfortunate that some people used it as a thought-terminating phrase against all conspiracies.
    - marnett 8y ago
      Do you mean Cultural Marxism? I haven't heard of Social Marxism before.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    Usually the crazy part of conspiracy theories is that they invent a group that's doing something (Reptillians, the Illuminati, whatever), or describe something a real group couldn't possibly pull off (e.g. the CIA runs North Korea, the Bilderberg Group chooses who wins elections). Which makes it very weird to see people level that accusation against claims that an obviously-real group did an obviously-plausible thing, like "this agency that exists to gather information gathered a lot of information". Or in this case "this PR firm ran several articles to affect PR". Sure, it's a conspiracy in that they aren't admitting to doing it, but why is that surprising?
dwringer 8y ago
And yet somehow a company sharing its acronym with the name "Lying Manipulative G's" is merely par for the course in today's world. "if you can't beat em, join em!"
mLuby 8y ago
Sounds like reasonably standard PR efforts for ULA. Seems like the news media should have done a better job vetting their sources.
bovermyer 8y ago
Short version of the article: One op-ed article attacking SpaceX's safety practices appears in the newspapers of several space-industry-oriented cities. The article is not written by the person it is attributed to, but rather by two people apparently affiliated with a PR firm in Washington, DC. One of the three main clients of said PR firm is Boeing, SpaceX's direct competitor.
- charliesharding 8y ago
  Safety practices for people going into space? Honestly.. Pretty sure people going out of the atmosphere, inches away from an instant, unimaginable death are aware that it's not exactly safe. The company obviously has a huge vested interest in not having people die but it's kind of inevitable when you're in such a high stakes game. NASA has had plenty of deaths
  - justtopost 8y ago
    From the space people I talk to, many in the very recent past harbored this notion that SpaceX was irresponsible with their early move-fast methods. However, as predicted, that all slowed down to a similarly glacial pace once they became entrenched in the red tape machine. Parity in that reguard is rapidly approaching. And a nitpick, NASA was the pioneer, and pushed hard during the cold war to develop ICBM tech, the failure rate then was more in line with the goals. As its just minor economic and exploration roles now, with less polarizing military applications, we see less frantic push. I.e. killing a few people to prevent ww3 > next internet sat/artists on mars/astroid mining. Its not a fair comparison.
    - kcorbitt 8y ago
      > killing a few people to prevent ww3 > next internet sat/artists on mars/astroid mining. Individuals have very different risk tolerances, often based on their deepest values. But I don't think we should say it's wrong to want to e.g. go to Mars, even if there's an 90% chance of failure. It's a reasonable tradeoff to make. If you succeed, you'll be hailed as a new civilization's Pilgrims, and will continue in that culture's oral history for as long as it exists. Children will sing songs about your feats, and dress up in crude facsimiles of your space suits on Landing Day. Adults will proudly trace their genealogy to members of your party, and speak admiringly about the values you instilled. Many people would trade their lives for a 10% chance of such a fate. As a society we should let them.
Rooster61 8y ago
Seems like run-o-the-mill big corporation FUD to me, and not even particularly well executed distribution of said FUD. Doesn't strike me as overly newsworthy. Am I missing something here?
Steel_Phoenix 8y ago
I'm glad Ars and others are doing this kind of reporting. The populace needs frequent reminders that ulterior motives are everywhere. There's a nearly inevitable lack of conscience within deeply established institutions where people, in committee, are paid to seek an outcome.
newswriter99 8y ago
I'm curious as to whether Eric Berger (the reporter who wrote this piece) saw the op-ed on the Houston Chronicle first (he worked for them before Ars) and smelled something fishy. The fact that the Chron used a screencap of Musk smoking that blunt to go along with the anti-SpaceX op-ed is unbelievable. Letting a PR firm throw mud at a client's competitor via a thinly-veiled op-ed is one thing, but helping them by taking part in the propaganda machine to that extent is something else entirely.
ejb99 8y ago
If you just assume that about 100% of what you read on the internet, see on the tv news, or read in a newspaper is bought and paid for by someone with a economic interest in the topic, you'll probably be right about 90%+ of the time.
- cde-v 8y ago
  You're clearly a shill for the critical thinking lobby, GTFO.
- arijun 8y ago
  Pointing out the more egregious examples can help take the wind out of their sails.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
The underlying message is that Boeing isn't confident they'll beat Crew Dragon to orbit. They've already stacked the deck with more funding due to their "legacy overhead" but apparently even that isn't enough.
- imglorp 8y ago
  Is Boeing having trouble competing on all of features, price, and schedule? I think the story is more complicated as always - If you watch Scott Manley's channel, I think there's a few mission profiles that ULA can do better than SpaceX. One launcher can't do everything well.
  - Rebelgecko 8y ago
    I think right now Boeing is ahead schedule-wise, but it's a bit of a coin flip for who will launch first. I wouldn't be surprised if they're within 3 months of each other, both for the initial test and the first crewed test.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      NASA says Boeing is behind. This press release is dated today: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/launch-dates-to-be-updated-more-regularly-as-commercial-crew-flights-draw-nearer https://www.nasa.gov/feature/launch-dates-to-be-updated-more...
- hef19898 8y ago
  I dug into SpaceX a little bit deeper the last couple of days, mainly to get an answer to the question whether reusabel launchers are financially feasible or not. I did not find an answer to that question, instead I found some other intriguing data. The development sure is cheaper at SpaceX compared to Arianespace, so I assume the same is true for Boeing. On the launch costs, taken everything into account, including the WSJ article using SpaceX internal data up to 2015, there is not much of a difference between SpaceX and Arianespace on average. It seems that SpaceX is undercutting the commercial competition with government contracts. Also, Google most likely saved SpaceX from bancruptcy in 2016. That ULA, as a historical DoD monoplist, plays in different league all together is a different story. I am not yet finished, so yes I might be mistaken with my conclusion so far.
joering2 8y ago
It was a significant moment to see two of the most powerful women in aerospace alongside one another—two fierce competitors coming together for the good of the country. Can someone explain me this line? What "good for the country" do they mean?
vl 8y ago
But why fueling continues after crew has boarded? What is the technical reason?
- balfirevic 8y ago
  Crew boards while the rocket is empty, which makes it safe. After that, there is launch escape system ready to take the crew to safety in case anything goes wrong during the fueling or launch. This is not considered less safe than fueling after the crew has boarded, and NASA agrees.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  The technical reason from what I understand is that the closer you fuel to launch, the more cryo fuel you can pump into the rocket, as it won't have time to expand its volume before being used.
- maccam94 8y ago
  The rocket runs on extremely cold fuel. It's impossible to perfectly maintain that temperature in the tank, so the fuel is constantly expanding and venting out of the tank so it doesn't explode. You can keep adding more chilled fuel to the tank though, so the goal is to top off the tank as close to launch as possible.
madrox 8y ago
This is somewhat tangential to the topic, but having worked in PR/marketing agency environments and heard stories from friends, I've found them to be the most amoral places to work at. The agency where I worked (social media marketing) would make outrageous claims and give a lot of "smoke and mirror" presentations to both land clients and give them the impression they were getting more for their money than they were. They'd engage in astroturf, fake views, and generally do whatever it took to deliver on the number they promised. It made me uncomfortable, but I was young in my career and thought that's just how the world worked. Thankfully I didn't have to stay there long enough for it to really rub off on me. I've heard enough stories from others over the years to know this wasn't an isolated experience. Most agencies only have a few big customers paying everyone's paychecks, and it's far easier to retain a client than land a new one. As a result, they're highly incentivized to do whatever it takes to keep them. It's probably the biggest dark side of a directly incentivized culture. Hearing that an agency for Boeing did this doesn't surprise me. What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting.
- clear_dg 8y ago
  > What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting. _If_ Boeing really is behind all this, they may well be unaware of the specific details, sure. But so what? This doesn't make them any less responsible. So I don't understand what makes this "worse".
  - madrox 8y ago
    I would personally find it distasteful if someone did something shady trying to further my interests and find out about it in the news, which is why I find it worse.
    - clear_dg 8y ago
      Call me cynical, but in my opinion, any company using the service of such agencies, have to know the possibility of abuses and unethical practices that might happen. They may even count on it, but with the great benefit that they now have plausable deniability.

208 points by frutiger 8y ago

Musk seems to attract so, so many tinfoil hat type conspiracy theories. He's veering into being almost a Hank Rearden caricature. EDIT: The tinfoil bit was over the top, but he's such a lightning rod and attracts so much criticism and persecution from the entrenched interests he is trying to disrupt, that it starts to look like there is some shadowy cabal trying to bring him down. I rather like the guy, we need some level of technological optimism to counteract the gloom and doom that is ever present.

ceejayoz 8y ago
"Boeing often employs PR firms against their competitors" is hardly a conspiracy theory.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  However, Boeing is not the only entity whose lunch SpaceX is threatening to eat. Wonder if other could be involved.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    Well, if you read the article, it traces back the op-eds to the people submitting them, who work for a PR firm, which has Boeing highlighted as one of their three big case studies on their website.
codeulike 8y ago
A tin-foil hat isn't really required, you just need to RTFA: An article critical of SpaceX has been repeatedly submitted to (and published in) 4 newspapers by a PR group called LMG who list Boeing as one of their major customers. Boeing are SpaceX's only competitor in the commercial crew area.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- octorian 8y ago
  Yet I somehow feel like the whole Commercial Crew contract wouldn't even exist had SpaceX not paved the way. Other space launch activities, however, have been getting their lunch eaten by SpaceX. This is probably pissing off everyone who was comfortable with the old approach, not just Boeing.
tomp 8y ago
Is the accusation of something being a "conspiracy theory" still a valid dismissal after Snowden?
- kazagistar 8y ago
  Or it was never a valid criticism on its own, but rather a shorthand to explain a toxic behavior pattern by certain people who would seek out all kinds of unsubtantiated nonsense regardless of merit (Lizard People, Illuminati, Social Marxism, etc). It's unfortunate that some people used it as a thought-terminating phrase against all conspiracies.
  - marnett 8y ago
    Do you mean Cultural Marxism? I haven't heard of Social Marxism before.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  Usually the crazy part of conspiracy theories is that they invent a group that's doing something (Reptillians, the Illuminati, whatever), or describe something a real group couldn't possibly pull off (e.g. the CIA runs North Korea, the Bilderberg Group chooses who wins elections). Which makes it very weird to see people level that accusation against claims that an obviously-real group did an obviously-plausible thing, like "this agency that exists to gather information gathered a lot of information". Or in this case "this PR firm ran several articles to affect PR". Sure, it's a conspiracy in that they aren't admitting to doing it, but why is that surprising?

dwringer 8y ago

And yet somehow a company sharing its acronym with the name "Lying Manipulative G's" is merely par for the course in today's world. "if you can't beat em, join em!"

mLuby 8y ago

Sounds like reasonably standard PR efforts for ULA. Seems like the news media should have done a better job vetting their sources.

bovermyer 8y ago

Short version of the article: One op-ed article attacking SpaceX's safety practices appears in the newspapers of several space-industry-oriented cities. The article is not written by the person it is attributed to, but rather by two people apparently affiliated with a PR firm in Washington, DC. One of the three main clients of said PR firm is Boeing, SpaceX's direct competitor.

charliesharding 8y ago
Safety practices for people going into space? Honestly.. Pretty sure people going out of the atmosphere, inches away from an instant, unimaginable death are aware that it's not exactly safe. The company obviously has a huge vested interest in not having people die but it's kind of inevitable when you're in such a high stakes game. NASA has had plenty of deaths
- justtopost 8y ago
  From the space people I talk to, many in the very recent past harbored this notion that SpaceX was irresponsible with their early move-fast methods. However, as predicted, that all slowed down to a similarly glacial pace once they became entrenched in the red tape machine. Parity in that reguard is rapidly approaching. And a nitpick, NASA was the pioneer, and pushed hard during the cold war to develop ICBM tech, the failure rate then was more in line with the goals. As its just minor economic and exploration roles now, with less polarizing military applications, we see less frantic push. I.e. killing a few people to prevent ww3 > next internet sat/artists on mars/astroid mining. Its not a fair comparison.
  - kcorbitt 8y ago
    > killing a few people to prevent ww3 > next internet sat/artists on mars/astroid mining. Individuals have very different risk tolerances, often based on their deepest values. But I don't think we should say it's wrong to want to e.g. go to Mars, even if there's an 90% chance of failure. It's a reasonable tradeoff to make. If you succeed, you'll be hailed as a new civilization's Pilgrims, and will continue in that culture's oral history for as long as it exists. Children will sing songs about your feats, and dress up in crude facsimiles of your space suits on Landing Day. Adults will proudly trace their genealogy to members of your party, and speak admiringly about the values you instilled. Many people would trade their lives for a 10% chance of such a fate. As a society we should let them.

Rooster61 8y ago

Seems like run-o-the-mill big corporation FUD to me, and not even particularly well executed distribution of said FUD. Doesn't strike me as overly newsworthy. Am I missing something here?

Steel_Phoenix 8y ago

I'm glad Ars and others are doing this kind of reporting. The populace needs frequent reminders that ulterior motives are everywhere. There's a nearly inevitable lack of conscience within deeply established institutions where people, in committee, are paid to seek an outcome.

newswriter99 8y ago

I'm curious as to whether Eric Berger (the reporter who wrote this piece) saw the op-ed on the Houston Chronicle first (he worked for them before Ars) and smelled something fishy. The fact that the Chron used a screencap of Musk smoking that blunt to go along with the anti-SpaceX op-ed is unbelievable. Letting a PR firm throw mud at a client's competitor via a thinly-veiled op-ed is one thing, but helping them by taking part in the propaganda machine to that extent is something else entirely.

ejb99 8y ago

If you just assume that about 100% of what you read on the internet, see on the tv news, or read in a newspaper is bought and paid for by someone with a economic interest in the topic, you'll probably be right about 90%+ of the time.

cde-v 8y ago
You're clearly a shill for the critical thinking lobby, GTFO.
arijun 8y ago
Pointing out the more egregious examples can help take the wind out of their sails.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

The underlying message is that Boeing isn't confident they'll beat Crew Dragon to orbit. They've already stacked the deck with more funding due to their "legacy overhead" but apparently even that isn't enough.

imglorp 8y ago
Is Boeing having trouble competing on all of features, price, and schedule? I think the story is more complicated as always - If you watch Scott Manley's channel, I think there's a few mission profiles that ULA can do better than SpaceX. One launcher can't do everything well.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  I think right now Boeing is ahead schedule-wise, but it's a bit of a coin flip for who will launch first. I wouldn't be surprised if they're within 3 months of each other, both for the initial test and the first crewed test.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    NASA says Boeing is behind. This press release is dated today: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/launch-dates-to-be-updated-more-regularly-as-commercial-crew-flights-draw-nearer https://www.nasa.gov/feature/launch-dates-to-be-updated-more...
hef19898 8y ago
I dug into SpaceX a little bit deeper the last couple of days, mainly to get an answer to the question whether reusabel launchers are financially feasible or not. I did not find an answer to that question, instead I found some other intriguing data. The development sure is cheaper at SpaceX compared to Arianespace, so I assume the same is true for Boeing. On the launch costs, taken everything into account, including the WSJ article using SpaceX internal data up to 2015, there is not much of a difference between SpaceX and Arianespace on average. It seems that SpaceX is undercutting the commercial competition with government contracts. Also, Google most likely saved SpaceX from bancruptcy in 2016. That ULA, as a historical DoD monoplist, plays in different league all together is a different story. I am not yet finished, so yes I might be mistaken with my conclusion so far.

joering2 8y ago

It was a significant moment to see two of the most powerful women in aerospace alongside one another—two fierce competitors coming together for the good of the country. Can someone explain me this line? What "good for the country" do they mean?

vl 8y ago

But why fueling continues after crew has boarded? What is the technical reason?

balfirevic 8y ago
Crew boards while the rocket is empty, which makes it safe. After that, there is launch escape system ready to take the crew to safety in case anything goes wrong during the fueling or launch. This is not considered less safe than fueling after the crew has boarded, and NASA agrees.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
The technical reason from what I understand is that the closer you fuel to launch, the more cryo fuel you can pump into the rocket, as it won't have time to expand its volume before being used.
maccam94 8y ago
The rocket runs on extremely cold fuel. It's impossible to perfectly maintain that temperature in the tank, so the fuel is constantly expanding and venting out of the tank so it doesn't explode. You can keep adding more chilled fuel to the tank though, so the goal is to top off the tank as close to launch as possible.

madrox 8y ago

This is somewhat tangential to the topic, but having worked in PR/marketing agency environments and heard stories from friends, I've found them to be the most amoral places to work at. The agency where I worked (social media marketing) would make outrageous claims and give a lot of "smoke and mirror" presentations to both land clients and give them the impression they were getting more for their money than they were. They'd engage in astroturf, fake views, and generally do whatever it took to deliver on the number they promised. It made me uncomfortable, but I was young in my career and thought that's just how the world worked. Thankfully I didn't have to stay there long enough for it to really rub off on me. I've heard enough stories from others over the years to know this wasn't an isolated experience. Most agencies only have a few big customers paying everyone's paychecks, and it's far easier to retain a client than land a new one. As a result, they're highly incentivized to do whatever it takes to keep them. It's probably the biggest dark side of a directly incentivized culture. Hearing that an agency for Boeing did this doesn't surprise me. What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting.

clear_dg 8y ago
> What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting. _If_ Boeing really is behind all this, they may well be unaware of the specific details, sure. But so what? This doesn't make them any less responsible. So I don't understand what makes this "worse".
- madrox 8y ago
  I would personally find it distasteful if someone did something shady trying to further my interests and find out about it in the news, which is why I find it worse.
  - clear_dg 8y ago
    Call me cynical, but in my opinion, any company using the service of such agencies, have to know the possibility of abuses and unethical practices that might happen. They may even count on it, but with the great benefit that they now have plausable deniability.