NASA's 49th

President Dwight Eisenhower signed the act creating NASA this date in 1958. In the half century since, the agency has been in the forefront of a revolution in our understanding of the Solar System and the universe as a whole.

Last week, however, was not a good one for either NASA or for the emerging private space industry. NASA was rocked by two unrelated stories that happened to come out at the same time. One involved an employee of a contractor sabotaging a computer to be used on the next shuttle mission. NASA personnel caught the problem, and it's not clear what NASA could have done to stop the person, but that story got wrapped up with a report that two astronauts had flown missions when they had been drinking alcohol before launch. One of those incidents allegedly happened when an astronaut was flying to the ISS aboard a Soyuz. On Saturday, however, a Russian spokesman and a cosmonaut both denied any such thing ever happened. The initial report understandably shocked many people, and NASA promised to make sure there will be nothing like that in the future, but it's not a good way to celebrate a birthday.

In Mojave, California, as reported in this blog, three people were killed when a Scaled Composites rocket engine exploded during testing. That accident was not as widely reported as, say, the collision and crash of two television news helicopters in Phoenix. Four were killed in that accident.

The news helicopters were documenting a car chase by police when the pilots seemed to lose track of each other. Scaled Composites is trying to build a spacecraft that will begin opening space travel to private enterprise. The editorial choice in reporting the one and not the other is interesting.