Steven Young is the managing editor of Spaceflight Now, a Web site that covers NASA. And when he talks about the agency’s new policy to keep shuttle launch times under wraps, it’s hard to argue with him.
“We feel it should be made clear that NASA is putting up an illusion of security, and that’s a story,” said Young. “We felt this was sort of an emperor-has-no-clothes issue.”
Young is among members of the Cape Canaveral press corps who have been struggling over what to do about NASA’s decision to withhold shuttle launch times until 24 hours before liftoff to tighten anti-terrorism security.
The problem is the policy is so rife with enormous holes that it’s hard to image how it could deter a determined terrorist — especially one bent on suicide — from attempting to attack one of the spaceships with an airplane or shoulder-launched missile.
That has made the clash a case study of what reporters and editors have been going through since Sept. 11 as they try to balance a clear need to withhold some information to protect security with security-spawned policies that seem to accomplish nothing.
The situation is this:
NASA has routinely announced shuttle launch times months in advance and posted them on its Web sites. But starting with Monday’s flight of shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station, things have changed.
The agency will announce the day of liftoff and a launch window — that’s a four-hour period during which the ship can fly — but not the exact time. That won’t come until 24-hours before blastoff from Kennedy Space Center, when it will be released.
That, obviously, lets the cat out of the bag, but there’s more.
Anyone using satellite-tracking computer software readily available on the Web can calculate the launch time to within a few seconds using data that NASA still posts on its Web sites. The data pinpoints when the station will pass over KSC, placing it in the spot the shuttle needs to take off and catch it.
Despite recognizing all this — and NASA’s refusal to publicly say what the policy gains — nearly all news organizations that regularly cover shuttle launches have grumbled about the plan but signed on.
Associated Press aerospace reporter Marcia Dunn said her stories typically don’t mention a specific launch time until the day before blastoff, so AP’s readers really aren’t missing anything.
But more to the point, she said, is AP’s policy “to not put anything on the wire that would be remotely helpful to terrorists. It’s not NASA’s fault to do what they can to protect against the bad guys.”
Other news organizations are following a similar line, including the Orlando Sentinel and Florida Today, the latter of which provides shuttle coverage for the Gannett Co.’s nearly 100 daily newspapers.
“I don’t see a compelling reason not to support it,” said Florida Today managing editor Bob Stover. “We’ll give it a chance and maybe revisit it, but the safe thing at this point is we don’t want to do anything that could potentially damage the space shuttle.”
CBS News has leaned one way, and then the other.
Bill Harwood, the network’s resident aerospace consultant at Cape Canaveral, posted the launch time on the CBS Web site, saying the time has long been known.
“It’s a tough call because you’re balancing what the agency says is good security policy against what is widespread knowledge,” he said. “Given the ease of access to the information, it was difficult to see what was being protected.”
However, CBS switched course for future missions after a meeting with NASA’s security chief, David Saleeba, convinced the network of “legitimate security concerns,” said CBS special events producer Mark Kramer. “It doesn’t affect how we cover this. We feel comfortable doing it.”
That has left Young at Spaceflight Now the holdout, at least for now. He said he may reconsider before the next shuttle flight in late May.
“We thought about this long and hard and had very detailed discussions,” Young said. “In the end, we felt it came down to the fact that it was our duty (to report) that it had holes in it. We’ve had 15-year-old schoolboys in Texas telling us when it’s going to launch.
“It’s hard to understand their thinking. It’s a case of, ‘Here’s something we can do (for security)’ without thinking about how it can be integrated into the real world.”
