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Bolden Forgot What He Said From Mars And Maybe We'll Name SLS Or Something

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 23, 2016
Filed under
Bolden Forgot What He Said From Mars And Maybe We'll Name SLS Or Something

Not My Job: NASA’s Charles Bolden Gets Quizzed On ‘Charles In Charge’, NPR
“SAGAL: Really? And what did you say from Mars?
BOLDEN: I have no idea.
SAGAL: You don’t know?
BOLDEN: No. I don’t remember.
ROXANNE ROBERTS: Really?
SAGAL: You’re…
BOLDEN: It was like we…
SAGAL: You recorded the…
BOLDEN: …Come in peace or something like that.”

and
“BOLDEN: We’re going to Mars in the 2030s. So we’ve got the vehicle called – we’re going to name it but right now we call it the Space Launch System. It’s a heavy lift launch vehicle.”

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

12 responses to “Bolden Forgot What He Said From Mars And Maybe We'll Name SLS Or Something”

  1. Daniel Woodard says:
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    I heard this live. I thought Bolden was quite entertaining. People don’t appear on “Wait, wait, don’t tell me” to advance a serious political/technical agenda.

  2. Bob Mahoney says:
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    So, are ‘crewed’ & ‘non-crewed’ now the official gender-neutral designations for types of spaceflight now?

    Just speaking phonetically, manned & unmanned roll off the tongue a bit easier (no hard consonant). I’m not sure they will go away, just for that reason.

    • Paul451 says:
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      People have talked about this before. We just don’t have a good verb to replace “manned”.

      “Crewed” is fine in print, but is too close to “crude” to work verbally. (“Uncrewed” works fine. But “crewed” doesn’t.)

      Human works as a noun and hence as a noun-modifier (“Human spaceflight”). But “human” can’t be verbed (“The next mission will be humanned”).

      “People” can be used as a verb, but its meaning is already taken as populate or inhabit, so we missed the boat there.

      “Staffed” and “occupied” work in other contexts, but doesn’t capture the spirit we’re going for here.

      • Bob Mahoney says:
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        I thought of the problem of ‘crude’ after I had posted.

        As I was reading your post I almost slid into ‘screwed’; THAT might cause some troubles during press conferences, too.

        Maybe we need to make up a new inoffensive word (in all senses) from scratch. I propose, off the top of my head, Lommed & unlommed.

        “The first launch of SLS (to be named later) will be unlommed. The second flight will be lommed.”

        There.

        • Paul451 says:
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          But “Lom” has no origin, no etymological path to get from here to there. Language rarely works like that.

          Crew came from a Latin term meaning “additional”, which evolved through “reinforcements” (military), to a ship’s crew (and later, an air-crew), which is how it’s used for space-travel. The path is stupid, but it’s a path.

          Likewise, Man (from the Germanic), originally meant person, both male and female, singular and plural. In that sense, “manned” is perfectly valid.

          Originally, other terms had to be used to differentiate between male and female “men”. Then “man” evolved to mean servants, including the meaning “manned” (ie, staffed or occupied, “Man the cannons!”) that we are talking about for space-missions. Only later, around 1000AD, did it start to be used specifically to mean any male, and only males.

          (I just googled this again and found the gender-specific terms in German and Old-English were Wer and Wif — the latter becoming Wife, obviously, but not directly. Apparently Housewife preceded the meaning of Wife, and originally simply meant “head female servant”. Which is why Wife became matched with Husband, which just meant manager, and also had nothing originally to do with marriage. (The link to marriage came about because the land-manager servant was often married to the head household servant, Husband was married to Wife.)

          Similarly, “woman” comes from Wifman (female person), which somehow merged phonetically with Werman (male person) around the time that Man/Men came to mean only male.

          …Language is weird.)

          So the historically correct path would be to go back to using “man/men” to mean all people, and create a new prefix for specifying male-people, just as we have wo-men to mean female-people.

          Of course, language doesn’t evolve like that either. So you’ve got more chance of introducing “Lom”.

          [Actually, I say “language doesn’t evolve like that”, but actually the spelling reforms of Webster and co were insanely arbitrary and artificial. One random guy decides he wants to reform spelling and every reform he introduces before he dies is successfully adopted by an entire nation, then that reform stops the moment he dies.

          …Language is weird.]

          • Bob Mahoney says:
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            That ‘Lom’ had no attachments was my point: no attachments, no offense to anybody. Let’s not forget how many words Lewis Carroll pulled out of thin air. I think Shakespeare made up a few, too.

            Honestly, I consider the entire issue pretty stupid because ‘manned’ & ‘unmanned’ work fine functionally and conceptually. Use them but teach their history, too.

            Thanks for all the word history. Language is weird but it’s still fascinating.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            The current aversion to ‘manned’ meaning ‘peopled’ is a temporary blip in social history, more than likely; at some point we will stop with ‘congressperson’ or ‘chairwoman’. It’s silly but born from obvious and real causes.

            There’s a hyper and understandable sensitivity among some women on the use of ‘man’ as a generic term, yes, but it will pass with time as the initial genesis fades into oblivion.

          • Bob Mahoney says:
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            Which genesis? The one wherein Adam got created first? 🙂

          • Paul451 says:
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            You mean, you think people will go back to using “man” as a generic for “people”?

            I don’t see it. Man has meant only male-person for too long, it’s been very stable. Using Man to mean People was a thousand year holdover which lasted until now only because male-people were always the heads of committees and members of congress. Once women entered those positions in a major way, the hold-over became untenable.

            IMO, it’s more likely that some slang version of People will become the generic term to replace “Man” in manned/unmanned/Mankind/chairman/etc. Like “Peeps”. Chairpeep.

            Or another word that means male will travel the reverse path from gender-specific to generic. First joking, then as slang, then as accepted language, then as formal language. Like “Bros” or “Buddies”. Women already use “best buds” for female friends without meaning to be ironic. Chairbud. Congressbud.

            (Three centuries later: “Modern linguists generally believe “bud” entered English from the German spelling of the Czech city “BudÄ›jovice”, via the drink brand Budweiser which was first manufactured there…”)

            Especially a non-English word for “man/male”. You could imagine a century or so of slang turning Mi Hombre into a generic term for both-sexes (“Yo! Mi hombres! Sup?”), then an abbreviation like “Homs” becoming slang, then accepted, them formal. Chairhom. Congresshom. Not far from Bob’s “Lom” actually.

            [And Hombre comes from the Latin Homo, which means Man in the generic sense of “people”… So the linguists will be happy.]

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            Here’s to you, Bud…

            And I grok your direction, really, and would like to see it happen as overtime I say ‘chairman’ or some such I feel a little icky, ya know, bro?

          • Bob Mahoney says:
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            I think you may be right that ‘man’ is on its way out as a generic reference…but even ‘guy’ is sliding back into general usage (“You guys”).

            The one trend that troubles me the most here is that toward writing in the plural pronoun so as to avoid gender specificity in the generic case. Instead of saying “A person should be his best” folks insert “their” for ‘his’… Some alternate his & her (staying consistent in their piece), but far too often doing so leads to a weakening of clarity in the text. ‘S/he’ of course is an abomination…

            In the future-set sci fi series I’m reading now hermaphrodites are referred to (per their preference) as ‘it’. Still feels weird to me ( referring to a person as an it) more than ten books in…

        • Chris Winter says:
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          Ouch! That makes me think of “loss of mission.” I guess I’m just an incorrigible pessimist.