Carol Costello on Rocket Mishap: 'Can NASA Really Trust Private Companies?'

Matthew Balan | October 29, 2014
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[More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.]

Carol Costello's liberal bias emerged yet again on the 29 October 2014 edition of CNN Newsroom, as she covered the catastrophic failure of an unmanned rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. During an interview of former astronaut Leroy Chiao, Costello wondered, "Can NASA really trust private companies to do its business?" Chiao replied, "It's not much of a change. I mean, NASA, per se, doesn't build rockets, and never really has. They've always hired commercial companies to build them."

However, the anchor pressed on with her skepticism of private business, and followed up by asking, "Well, you know, it's a concern, because NASA also plans to use private companies to take astronauts into space. Should those plans be put on hold in light of what happened?" The former commander of the International Space Station replied by defending the public-private partnership:

LEROY CHIAO, FORMER NASA ASTRONAUT: Oh, no. I mean, you know, rocketry is still something that's very difficult to do. It's complex pieces of machinery. You know, just as – just as certain as there will be another airline crash sometime in the future, you can bet that there'll be another rocket mishap. It doesn't mean that there's any kind of lack of oversight. You know, we've got the FAA looking over the airlines – making sure that they're regulated – and the same is happening in the space business. You've got NASA and the FAA looking over the shoulders of these commercial providers.

We've been going – we've been launching astronauts into space for over 50 years. The technologies mature. It's a matter of – of seeing if we can create a commercial environment for these commercial companies to make a profit, and then, let NASA buy those services, rather than have to run it itself.

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