Other than in Texas and Florida the regional US press seldom treats NASA’s human spaceflight, or exploration,  program as a local story (goodness but manned was an easier adjective to use). And near Huntsville, AL too. Another, as seen over the last two weeks, was at the Cleveland Plain Dealer via the reporting of John Mangels. He this week ran his wrap-up on the successful test of the Ares 1-X single-stage version of a proposed, post-shuttle launcher for sending Americans to low Earth orbit aboard a rocket made in America. The piece, necessarily, shrouds the program in doubt. This might, he tells readers, be not only first but last for a rocket named Ares 1-anything. Strategy, architecture, and money are all up in the air at NASA.  Into the big-picture policy story Mangels weaves the mixed emotions at the Glenn Research Center next to Cleveland’s airport. Its managers, researchers, and engineers played a big role in getting the rocket ready and fully instrumented with data-gathering sensors.

By the way, in last week’s post I wondered whether and how the heavy multi-media burden Mangels carried in covering the flight – blogging in near real-time plus writing conventional news stories for print – affected his final copy or the reporting process. From the looks of things, he did just fine despite what he reports as a bit of sleep deprivation – days starting at 4 a.m. with work till late into the evening. And his blog got heavy traffic on launch day – 14,000 page views.

- Charlie Petit

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