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Space & Planetary Science

Breaking Mars Story: Noise From The BBS Crowd

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 2, 2008

Editor’s note: The folks at unmannedspaceflight.com have gone into smug elitist mode again. This time it is regard to the emerging story first reported by veteran Aviation Week reporter Craig Covault about possible news from Mars Phoenix experiments – results significant enough to have caused interaction with the White House.

The bulletin board’s moderator, Doug Ellison, expresses some issues that he has with Covault’s reporting in his response to a post about the way in which Covault asked a question at a recent Mars Phoenix press conference. Ellison wrote “In private, after the press conf or by telephone. Not by raising a nightmare of almost certainly inappropriate speculation and hyperbole by being quite so smug and veiled. I like Craig, I like his articles, and I like the fact he’ll take creations by people here and publish them. But I really don’t like the way he’s handled this. If nothing else, he’s given us an admin headache.”

Oh, how unfortunate Doug – you “really don’t like the way he’s handled” this potentially exciting news because it has caused your BBS to have an “admin heacache”. You guys dump on Craig for “inappropriate speculation and hyperbole”, yet the title of the discussion thread at on your website is “The MECA story, A place for speculation. Why is your “speculation” appropriate and Craig’s alleged “speculation” inappropriate? Get a grip, Doug – you can’t have it both ways. Besides, I’ll bet he has far better access to the facts than you do.

Of course, the denizens of that BBS will soon enage in attacks on me and NASA Watch in response – things that Mr. Ellison loftily claims to forbid on his website – but allows to persist when he sees fit. Oh well, Doug, so much (again) for consistency …

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.