In case you missed the comments to previous posts (here and here) about the flawed Wired News article about March Storm and space weaponization, there have been a few developments. On Saturday Wired News published the same letter to the editor posted here Thursday night. Wired News also corrected the original article to reflect more accurately the true nature of ProSpace and March Storm:
This week is “March Storm,” when 50 to 75 volunteer lobbyists will spend three days speaking with staffers from more than 250 offices on Capitol Hill. Organized by citizen lobby group Prospace, the volunteers will travel on their own dime to push a number of initiatives to open space to ordinary citizens faster, including a draft bill to create a $250 million National Space Prize, among other things.
Prospace will also be calling for the creation of the Center for Entrepreneurial Space Access that will “encourage cooperation between emerging space companies and the Department of Defense,” according to ProSpace. The Center will be located at the Air Force Research Lab on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
This was after Wired News also published a number of other letters to the editor (which they call “Rants ‘n’ Raves”; in this case with an obvious emphasis on the former) calling the author, John Lasker, to task for the inaccuracies. The corrections regarding ProSpace, though, don’t address some of the other flaws in the article, including Mr. Lasker’s undue reliance on Bruce Gagnon as an expert on space weaponization.
When the article first came out last Wednesday, I assumed that the errors were simply laziness on the part of the author: unfortunate but not malicious. Now, though, given the evidence that emerged since then (including the fact that ProSpace president Marc Schlather had an extensive interview with Mr. Lasker prior to the article’s publication), it’s difficult to chalk up the flaws in this piece to ignorance rather than malfeasance.
