
Welcome to the New Space Age - uptown
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/welcome-to-the-new-space-age
======
jessriedel
An interesting aspect of collecting all these space stories in one place is
that it allows you quickly confirm how many conform to the same science-
journalism template: an extended human-interest story that doesn't start
dribbling bits of science until many paragraphs in. Even when the focus of the
article is a human's role, the writer follows the formula of telling a
compelling anecdote rather than actually delivering important facts.

"In early February, Gwynne Shotwell arrived in Saudi Arabia for a bit of last-
minute cleanup...."

"Kathleen Howell never aspired to walk on the moon. When she watched the first
lunar landing as a teenager in 1969, she was more intrigued by the looping
route that brought the Apollo 11 astronauts from Earth to the Sea of
Tranquility and back..."

"On July 18, outside the West Texas town of Van Horn, hundreds of Blue Origin
employees and their families and friends gathered to watch the New Shepard
rocket blast off toward the edge of space...."

"The chicken sandwich has to get to space. This is what everyone at World View
Enterprises Inc. was thinking as they set to work in the predawn hours of June
29, 2017, at the Page Municipal Airport in Arizona....

"Shou-Ching Jaminet, a molecular biologist and former researcher at Harvard
Medical School, spent almost a year preparing an experiment for her small
biotech startup, Angiex, to study the effects of weightlessness on a potential
cancer drug. By June she was nervous with anticipation,..."

Does no one else get sick of this? I would love more inverted-pyramid coverage
of science.

~~~
conception
It's because research has discovered that people care about single, individual
stories; especially those they can relate. So stories like this are how they
capture people not already interested in the topics' interest. You see this
everywhere. It's not "see this home get remodeled" it's "hear the story of
this family and how remodeling their home changed their life", not "bake an
awesome cupcake" but "while Betty bakes let's see her family at home and how
her mum is doing". Most people just don't connect with big picture ideas or
raw data.

~~~
jessriedel
That's an explanation but not a justification. People like celebrity gossip
too, but newspapers feel a duty (due to both external social pressure and an
internal code) to not include updates on the opinion of the Kardashians as
part of their war coverage. Although the upteenth description of a random
postdoc's laboratory life (an example used elsewhere in this thread) seems
less trashy than the Kardashians, I think they have similar news value.

~~~
Qworg
It is a justification. If newspapers were a public good, they could afford to
write pieces that didn't necessarily land well with the public, but had more
substance around the science.

While newspapers don't include the Kardashians in the war coverage, they DO
include the Kardashians. War is very different from Science - it is
straightforward, exciting to read about, and has an immediate human interest.
Science is none of those things.

~~~
jessriedel
You aren't disputing whether it's a justification, you're disputing my
empirical claim that newspapers leave the Kardashians out of war coverage for
principled reasons. But we can just pick some other news topic that is also
dry like science yet newspaper feel duty-bound (or shame-avoidance-driven) to
not enhance with celebrity gossip. (Otherwise you're claiming that duty/shame
play no role whatsoever in news coverage, which I think is clearly false and
am not interested in arguing about.)

~~~
Qworg
Hopefully my tone didn't make it seem like I was spoiling for a fight - I
don't know of a dry topic that's not enhanced with stories about the people
involved in mainline journalism.

~~~
jessriedel
That's also not what I'm saying. I'm saying there are certain types of
enhancements (Kardashians) which are considered unbecoming to discuss in
certain serious topics (supreme court decisions). I think the list of eschewed
enhancements for science should be expanded to include the type discussed in
my top level comment.

~~~
Viliam1234
There is probably a balance in how much unbecoming things can you leave out of
your newspaper before its readership drops so low that it goes bankrupt.

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rory096
Shout out to the stunning issue cover photo by John Kraus (/u/johnkphotos),
who got his start posting photos of launches on Reddit's /r/spacex.

[https://twitter.com/BW/status/1022430733829324800?s=19](https://twitter.com/BW/status/1022430733829324800?s=19)

~~~
navaati
Wow ! This must be one of the greatest rocket photo I've ever seen, it looks
surreal, too clean to be true, the perfect shape of these 9 fire jets !

Thanks for sharing it. I'd love to get a high res, standalone (without the
Bloomberg cover) version.

~~~
rory096
I'm not sure if Kraus invented those underexposed exhaust shots, but he's
certainly popularized them over the last couple years.

He sells prints on his website: [https://johnkrausphotos.com/buy-
prints](https://johnkrausphotos.com/buy-prints)

~~~
adwi
Not to quibble, but they appear perfectly exposed to me... that’s the true
technical achievement in his work.

~~~
rory096
Oh yeah, definitely. That's just the term I've seen other launch photogs use
for it — I assume they mean underexposed relative to a normal photo trying to
capture the rocket itself. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about
photography outside of ~5 hours in a dark room in high school.)

e.g.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/899jq5/jumped_on_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/899jq5/jumped_on_the_superunderexposed_engine_view_train/)

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caio1982
It's hard to assess the quality of all these articles listed in this special
page but — oh my — the topics are very well choosen and quite interesting. I
easily calculated I will spend the next few days to read them all, not just
skim them. Great job, Bloombergians!

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rb808
Didn't mention Rocket Lab that wants multiple launches a day to near orbits.
[https://www.rocketlabusa.com](https://www.rocketlabusa.com)

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jharohit
Meanwhile in Asia...[http://inc-asean.com/editor-picks/is-southeast-asia-the-
new-...](http://inc-asean.com/editor-picks/is-southeast-asia-the-new-bastion-
for-space-technology/)

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okket
Can the link please get changed to the actual article and not the issue
landing page? Thanks.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/welcome-t...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/welcome-
to-the-new-space-age)

