Only a very small percentage of the public is interested in space flight, physics or science. If you make the shows too high brow you will only get a clone of NASA TV, with the same number of advetisers – zero. And lose the audience who pays the bills.

Or to put it another way, if you want market driven media then you have to focus it on the market. And let the market judge good from bad.

And yes I do vote yes on education. Kids are also not getting the culutral literacy they should have with the focus on standardized tests in math and reading. Instead they are just teaching to the tests.

I’m sure the producer and editor did a lot of the “dumbing down” to help the average person understand… But it’s sad that the movie industry continually dumbs things down even when their experts are telling them how things work. “…But this looks cooler!” says the movie executive.

I still run into a lot of people that think that gravity disappears once you reach the altitude of space and are shocked (or disbelieving) when I tell them that spacecraft actually continually fall around the curvature of the Earth. This is the state of scientific illiteracy in the United States… Next time you see a budget increase for schools VOTE YES!

That is a wide brush you are painting the profession of jouralism with.

Keep in mind this is a foreign reporter writing for a mid-eastern news outlet who has an axe to grind with Sir Richard Branson. And he was already run out of England for similar behavior.

Also Walter Cronkite descriptions of spaceflight in the 1960’s was no more simplistic then the writings of Clarke, Asimov or Heinlien n the days before spaceflight and astronautics was common knowledge. Its easy to look back now, from the perspective of a generation raised on space exploration and CGI and say they were “simplistic”.

Keep in mind that most journalists are usually not techno-geeks who have a solid understanding of scientific principles and what is usually related to legal regulations on engineering practices. There are some notable exceptions, but they are exceptions.

Even a reporter with as much credibility as Walter Cronkite was noted as being wildly inaccurate when he was reporting about the Apollo program back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. And he even did his homework. If you have any knowledge about rocket science and propulsion engineering, or even celestial mechanics, you will find those broadcasts that tried to describe the early Apollo flights to be overly simplistic and sometimes condescending.

Now that these “critics” have exposed themselves for exactly what they are, it also exposes reasonable ideas like the concept that NASA has nothing to do with commercial spaceflight but instead is governed by a branch of the FAA. And that is only for manned commercial spaceflight at that. Or quietly informing these reporters that even NASA has to seek vehicle permits from the U.S. Department of Transportation. And get FAA airspace clearance when launching vehicles. None of this is news to those in the “know”, but may be news to some of these reporters.

This is *not* a good beginning for this industry.