Media Coverage During the Mission
There's an anecdote which indicates what's news - dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news. For many of the news media the shuttle doing what it's supposed to do is not news, or at most it's fairly insignificant news. Many media show up for shuttle launches just in case there's an accident and it becomes newsworthy. It's regrettable but that's what the consumer has chosen to accept based on which television stations they choose to watch and which newspapers they choose to purchase. Those who want to find out more about the space program are on their own. Media who are interested in finding out more are considered pests by NASA's public affairs office which just caters to what the major media want and what public affairs considers simple enough for the public to understand.There was more media attention on the STS-107 mission than normal because of Ilan Ramon's presence on the crew, and the perceived greater risk from terrorists. But the media interest quickly dropped to almost nothing after launch because it was viewed as a 'boring microgravity' mission without any spacewalks, dockings to a space station, or even robot arm operations. Only a handful of reporters, including author Philip Chien, actually followed the mission on a daily basis and filed stories. Just five reporters showed up for the on-orbit press conference.
Entry flight director LeRoy Cain was asked about the foam strike the day before reentry. Cain said,
“The engineers and analysts took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever, and therefore we haven’t changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. And there’s nothing we need to do in that regard. So, nothing different. It will be nominal, standard trajectory. I believe that, at this time, we can’t say with great detail the degree of the damage, other than all the analysis suggests it would be very minor, in terms of the amount of tile that might actually be missing or had been removed. All of the analysis says that we have plenty of margin in those areas in that regard, and that the impact could not have been from this particular material significant enough to take out any significant amount of tile. So I can’t tell you inches by inches or depth, but I can tell you we think it’s going to be very small.”
Media Coverage During the Reentry
About 20 reporters were at the Kennedy Space Center's shuttle landing facility on February 1st. CNN was the only U.S. network to provide updates on Columbia's progress during its reentry.
CNN made arrangements with Dallas, Texas television station WFAA to videotape Columbia as it flew overhead. It should have shown a bright meteor going across the sky but instead showed several pieces coming apart.
CNN producer Dave Santucci in Atlanta, Georgia was astonished to see rival Fox News Network's video was identical to CNN's video - other than the fact that the CNN logo was missing.
Santucci immediately suspected that Fox was pirating CNN's feed and instructed his technician to add an additional 'CNN' in another portion of the screen. Sure enough it showed up on Fox's broadcast too. Santucci decided to make sure all of Fox's viewers knew where Fox was obtaining their video and switched the CNN video to anchor Miles O'Brien. CNN viewers were confused to see O'Brien's side for a couple of seconds. Fox viewers were shocked to see O'Brien apparently also working for Fox! The Fox producers realized they got caught red-handed and quickly switched to NASA's video feed of Mission Control.
But CNN certainly wasn't perfect - at one point its caption stated that Columbia was traveling at 18 times the speed of light!
Ynet, the largest Hebrew language newspaper in Israel put out a premature story declaring that Ilan Ramon had landed safely! In Hebrew, the site declared, “Ilan Ramon Returned from Space -- The Shuttle Columbia descended [touched down] successfully in Florida. The Space Shuttle Columbia descended just a short while ago with success in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Astronauts, amongst them "Aluf Mishne" [Ilan's title in the Air Force] Ilan Ramon, will undergo a series of physical examinations, and nine hours after touchdown they will meet with the local media.” They quickly pulled the incorrect story from their website when they realized what had happened.
Media Coverage After the Accident
Interest in the mission skyrocketed after the accident. Media who didn't bother to come in for the Saturday morning landing decided to come in to cover the accident. NASA's Kennedy Space Center received 559 requests for additional media badges that day. Dozens of satellite trucks showed up after the accident. The STS-107 mission had gone beyond news and became history.
The media quickly converged on the towns in East Texas where debris was found
NASA had its first press conference several hours after the accident with lead flight director Milt Heflin and shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore. Only a few of the reporters at that press conference also covered the mission. An audio and a corrected transcript.
Several months after the accident NASA safety head Bryan O'Connor and shuttle head Bill Readdy told author Philip Chien about their reactions at the STS-113 Flight Readiness Review to the statement that the bipod foam incident on STS-112 was not a safety issue. O'Connor explained,
"It wasn't clear to me what [Smelser] had said was all there. I asked him to expand on that and I even asked for the hazard analysis report, and somebody actually brought it to me during the meeting. So it was a clarification. He did make a comment that it was not a flight safety issue, and my concern was whether or not he was talking specifically about that event [on STS-112] or in general, whether it had been taken off the books as an issue at all. The hazard analysis report showed that it was still a generic problem that we have to deal with. The program assured me at the time that they were working it -- not as a constraint to flight, though, but offline."In simpler terms O’Connor said he was asking Smelser for a clarification whether the situation was a non-issue or something which needed to be worked between shuttle flights, but without stopping flights. NASA Associate Administrator for Spaceflight William Readdy added,
"We both remarked on that. I think the exchange was something to the effect of, 'Is there any credible aerodynamic transport mechanism that could get foam from that area to impact the orbiter?' And the answer that we were given at the time was ‘No.’ But clearly, in retrospect, there's some stuff about the aerodynamics that we don't know. I'm sure that as a result of the accident we'll go back to the wind tunnels, we'll go do further analysis."
Satellite trucks in Florida photo by NASA.
Satellite trucks in Texas courtesy of the Daily Sentinel.
Other photos from the author's collection.
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