THE ONE ABOUT GETTING CANCELLED
Textbook lunacy.
Steve Price, an older white male who apparently appears on TV weekly and has his own radio show, has been cancelled. Or something like that.1
I don’t really care for Steve Price all that much. What I do care about is NASA’s attempt to get human beings back on the moon.
It’s strange that these two worlds collided on the weekend, thanks to Price’s column in the Herald Sun. Price, who is not a science journalist, discussed NASA’s plans to go back to the moon with the Artemis I mission
Here’s what happened.
Look, I’ll be brief this week because I’m not really sure I want to give this piece all that much air.
Steve Price, a man who has previously been described as a “curmudgeon,” penned a piece for the Herald Sun on Friday. It was headlined:
I’M OLD, MALE AND CANCELLED
I simply do not care to interrogate any of this column, which is nonsensical from the jump. How does a cancelled dude get to write a column in a major paper every week? Anyway, that’s none of my business. I’m here for the science.
So, let’s focus on these few short paragraphs that appeared in print and online:
There’s so many silly things in these 100 words that I really don’t know what to eviscerate, but let’s just go to the heart of the matter. Let’s zoom in on the final paragraph:
Were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin [on the moon] because of their race or sex or because they could fly a spacecraft — you know the answer.
I do, Steve! Many other people who got to read your column also know the answer!
Women were not allowed to be astronauts in 1969, when Neil and Buzz landed on the moon. The astronaut pool came from military pilots and, as you would have surely known because you are an intelligent dude, women weren’t able to be those at that time, either. So the reason those two men were there was, yes, they were highly skilled and highly trained individuals, but also, there were no women as they were actively barred from participating in the human spaceflight program.2
So, if you want to find the best astronauts you can find, seems pretty ridiculous to exclude 50% of the population as a starting point?
Fuck.
Fun fact: The word lunacy comes from the latin word “luna” which means Moon.
Usually, I try and include lessons in these newsletters but I’m exhausted by this one. The lesson, maybe, is please, for the love of god, read and support good journalism. That’s really all I want you to get out of this week’s newsletter. Go and find good journalists and good people who do the hard work and research when they write their columns about the state of the world. That’s all. Do that.
If you want to know, perhaps, where to start, may I offer up all these wonderful Australian science journalists?
And stay hydrated, friends.
WHAT ELSE? Well, I had a pretty decent week, I guess!3
In accepting this award, I wanted to give a big spiel in my speech but I was unceremoniously booted of the stage because of a 30 second time limit.
So, with some time: We’ve seen, particularly in the last two years but extending even further back, the erosion of trust in our media institutions, the completely polarized and divisive nature of social media, state vs state bickering and a new age of misinformation and mistruth. We’ve also seen newsrooms gutted over the last decade — some have lost specialist reporters in science, some didn’t even have them to begin with. These two issues have increased the size of the information vacuum we’ve been faced with during world-changing crises. I want to give my thanks to the science journalists who have played a critical role during the pandemic and shown the immense value such a person provides to a newsroom.
Thanks to organizations like the Science Journalists Association of Australia, we have in Australia a community of freelancers and professionals with the skills and passion to make science accessible, interesting, valued and unmissable. Australia can be -- and should be -- at the frontier of science journalism and science writing. The talent is here. The expertise is here. The people are here.
So, hire them.
That wonderful header image comes from Public Domain Review’s “Photographs of (models of) the Moon” — from 1874!
This, despite early studies suggesting women may actually be more suited to spaceflight than men. Wonder why they didn’t get to go to space then?
Many thanks to all the people who have said kind things since last Wednesday. Truly appreciate the support.