Eric Berger has more details from Jeff Bezos on flight-test plans. If I were to do a new edition of the book, I’d replace references to Armadillo with what we now know about Blue Origin. It’s an entirely different approach from XCOR and Virgin Galactic; “Look ma, no pilot.”
[Update a while later]
“To let space travel flourish, leave it to the cranks and crackpots.”
Yes. Let’s end Apolloism and NASA worship.
[Update a few minutes later]
I think that Loren Grush has a legitimate complaint about who was, and wasn’t invited to that tour. It’s not at all clear how Blue Origin came up with the list. Alan Boyle was obvious, because he’s in Seattle and has been covering this stuff for years, as were Eric Berger and Jeff Foust, but I think that they could have accommodated more, and more women.
From the Grush piece:
Women are still undervalued in science — especially when it comes to space — and not enough is being done to fix it.
Not if the pictures at the BO facility are any indication.
Yes, there are many women working there, I know several.
Grush is an entitled hypocrite. There’s about a handful of other female space reporters I personally know who didn’t get invited. Why aren’t they bitching and moaning about being excluded? Why doesn’t Grush find out who they are and list their names?
What makes her entitled to attend Bezos’ Blue Origin unveiling? Her gender?
What makes her entitled to know Blue Origin’s reasoning behind why their list was assembled the way it was? It’s none of her god damn business. She needs to grow up and act like a god damn adult.
I’m a (male) space reporter and I didn’t get invited to attend the Bezos unveiling. It sucks, but that’s how the business works. You don’t get invited to attend all the good stuff, and when you don’t, you play the game of bitching and complaining, hoping they’ll invite you next time.
That is how it works. You’re not entitled to know why certain people were invited but not yourself. Such incredible arrogance. I’m incredibly insulted by her attitude. Unfortunately because I’m a guy I can’t bitch and complain that I was discriminated against because of my gender. Give me a fucking break.
You know what really pisses me off? I run into Brett Alexander a couple times a year and he always refuses to talk to me on the record. The excuses vary, but the bottom line remains. It sucks, everyone loves Blue Origin news. I can’t even get BO to respond on the record to my emails.
But you know what? I’m not ENTITLED to speak with him, or anyone, on the record, or even off the record. That is how the business works. Don’t like it? Find another outlet to work that has better exposure and better reason for you to get invited. Work harder to learn more about your beat so you can say you are so much smarter than the others who got invited. Become better at developing sources. Don’t publish a story whining about how you’re a victim because of your gender.
From
“I celebrated by being left out of an important aerospace reporting event I *SHOULD* have been covering.”
to
“I don’t mean to suggest that Blue Origin purposefully excluded certain journalists because we are women.”
That’s EXACTLY what she did! What a spoiled brat, a huge hypocrite.
There’s about a handful of other female space reporters I personally know who didn’t get invited. Why aren’t they bitching and moaning about being excluded? Why doesn’t Grush find out who they are and list their names?
Well, Mika McKinnon, Miri Kramer, and Sarah Fecht have also commented about it.
Who cares? That is completely beside the point.
I was simply answering your question about other women space reporters.
Here’s another laugher:
“By inviting mostly men for the opportunity, Blue Origin has ensured that female reporters won’t have either the access or the show-stopping story that would allow them to advance in a male-dominated field.”
What a joke! A female reporter is not going to get “held back” because she didn’t get invited to the Blue Origin unveiling. Reporters are based on the quality of their work and the stories they write. The best stories are the ones that are EXCLUSIVE. Ones that other reporters don’t have. While getting to attend the Blue Origin unveiling is nice, it won’t make or break one’s career.
Just more pathetic, entitled victimization from Loren.
The best stories are the ones that are EXCLUSIVE!
Please explain how gender has contributed to exclusivity here.
It doesn’t. I never implied that it did.
It’s an entirely different approach from XCOR and Virgin Galactic; “Look ma, no pilot.”
Not really. “Blue Origin wants to put a human pilot in its New Shepard spacecraft in 2017, founder Jeff Bezos said on Tuesday.”
http://www.pddnet.com/news/2016/03/blue-origin-wants-human-test-pilots-flight-2017
That’s not a quote, it’s a misquote. What he said was that he wanted to put a test passenger in it.
Grush, Kramer, and Drake all do good work, and I agree that the public would have benefited from their coverage of the event.
I think But its invitations do send an implied message: the company doesn’t value female voices. is a little hyperbolic. One of the of the few people to speak publicly for Blue (besides Jeff Bezos and Rob Meyerson) is Dr. Erica Wagner (2 PhDs according to her LinkedIn).
This seems like the sort of non-story Keith Cowing would jump on.
Yeah, in retrospect, I like Loren, but she was a little whiny. I know a lot of great women who work there.
But I’ll bet if the company’s name was PINK ORIGIN, it would have been completely different. 😉
Vox should be embarrassed that someone signed off on this piece of garbage. Then again, I don’t read Vox and this is just another reason not to.
What “great work” does Loren do? Please explain, in detail.
I think she has a legitimate complaint, too. There are lots of great female (who I presume self-identify as women) space communicators out there. I’d even add Emily Lakdawalla to her list. I know her space beat is more planetary science, but she does consistently excellent work and does a great job of making complex concepts accessible to laypeople.
I think Loren came off as whiny, too – it totally sounded like something Keith Cowing would write (the thing about Keith Cowing was a jab at her, not you).
Well, Emily is great, but this is not her beat.
She doesn’t have a legitimate complaint. Here complaint was: I SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE! AND I WASN’T INVITED BECAUSE I’M A WOMAN!
You know the best way to get Blue Origin to invite you to future high-profile press events? Shit all over them in a bloviating, self-serving, entitled blog post, accusing them of not “valuing” female voices!
Ya, gushing about them, saying how awesome it would have been to be there, and how disappointed you were because it would have been super cool to write about would have been a better route to future invites.
I love the fact that people are starting these private efforts with private money.
It would be interesting, to me anyway, if the outlay of personal or corporate money for guys like Bezos and Musk are equivalent, in some sort of normalized fashion, to what the Wright Brothers laid out to do their airplane research.
The Wrights were pretty successful with their bike shop. So much so that they had extra money to spend to research, design, and build airplanes.
I’m wondering if their costs as a percentage of their “fortune” is comparable to Musk’s costs as a percentage of his fortune (or Bezos).
It’s difficult to normalize the value of the “fortunes” in such a way as to make it apples to apples. The airplane was a smaller project with cheaper materials and the Wright’s only did a little bit of hiring out – engine work for example. They did most of the work and Musk/Bezos could not.
But it would be interesting to know if the Wrights ability to finance the airplane was more, less or the same as Bezo’s or Musk’s ability to finance their projects.