> To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds.
Since the article claims to be about one op-ed piece submitted to many places, it seems reasonable to assume he wrote it, but that the mentioned PR firm then submitted it far and wide.
It's also not clear from that wording if they actually spoke with Hagar (they "attempted to reach" him), or if this information comes from another source.
In any case, it's still an obvious smear campaign.
To be pedantic, he -did- write the article, but not for a newspaper. It was submitted to multiple large newspapers in space-heavy cities around the country as an Op Ed without his awareness (or at least, "ostensibly on his behalf") by the PR firm.
I blog occasionally about defense issues. I got a call out of the blue from someone who said they liked something I'd written about the F-35 (this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/08/stovl-the-f-35-and-how-we...), and would I be interested in getting paid to write an op-ed about the current state of the F-35 program?
I'm always interested in getting paid, so I said sure, let's talk. And over the course of ten minutes or so of conversation, it came out that:
- What the caller really wanted was an article about all the cost overruns of the F-35 program;
- Specifically, an article that attributed those cost overruns to the rocky development of the F-35's engine, Pratt and Whitney's F135 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_F135); and
- That the caller was representing a D.C. "government relations" (aka lobbying) firm.
At that point I politely ended the conversation, because it was obvious what was happening.
The question of what engine to put in the F-35 was the subject of a long and bitter political battle back in the 2000s between the two big producers of aircraft engines in the US, Pratt and Whitney and General Electric. P&W won that battle and got their engine chosen for the F-35, but GE self-funded their own alternative engine and then pushed hard for years to get Congress to approve funding it as an "alternate engine" -- a sort of insurance policy against P&W tanking the too-big-to-fail F-35 project by screwing their engine up. The Air Force didn't want that insurance policy, but GE won the support of a few powerful Senators on the Armed Services and Appropriations committees, and those Senators managed to steer enough money to GE to keep the program alive until 2011, when it was finally axed for cost-cutting reasons. (Here's some background on this story: https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2009/07/experts-contractors-an..., https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0217/F-..., https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/157649-pen...)
So what was going on, I surmised, was that someone with an interest in making Congress regret the decision to cancel GE's alternate engine -- maybe GE themselves, maybe some other company in their orbit, or maybe just someone with a financial interest in seeing UTX (P&W's parent company) go down a few points and GE go up -- had decided that the time was ripe to start building a public record linking the F-35's problems to the decision to go with P&W's engine; and they had money to spend to hire people to make that happen. (It wouldn't even need to be much money. By the standards of defense contracting, writers are dirt cheap.) And so they had engaged this lobbying firm, and the lobbying firm had gone looking for people who could write knowledgeably about the F-35, and Google had led them to me.
I didn't take the gig. But it did provide an interesting case study in the kind of maneuvering that goes on behind the scenes of the manufacturing of opinion.
Curious what the going cost for funding this type of activity is. I assume drastically cheaper than desired result profits, but in comparison to traditional advertising?
Should we disregard safety on their account, too?
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.
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.
NASA did not develop ICBM technology; the USAF did. NASA used ICBMs in their early days, particularly Atlas missiles. There may well have been some cross-pollination of basic rocket design technology. But NASA was not in the business of making ICBMs and had nothing to do with MAD or the nuclear triad.
The most common version of it says good things about your own company.
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.