Smells Like Teen Spirit

Uh, yeah...

John McKnight made the mistake of assuming a press release, previously
published without attribution (so it looked like a regular news article)
by Space Daily was actually written by the Moon Society, rather than
by the Space Settlement Initiative folks. As far as I know, nobody
in the Moon Society saw that release before it went out; if we had
we would have corrected at least a couple of factual errors, such
as the fact that the endorsement was made by the board in November,
long before the Columbia accident, and that the Moon Society is a
supporter of John McKnight's space settlement summit. The tone
of the first couple of paragraphs was definitely not the way we
would have phrased it, but on the whole the press release didn't
seem that bad and we certainly weren't expecting this sort of rseponse...

We've had an item on our support for the "societies working together"
effort John's been talking about up on the Moon Society web site
for about a month now:

http://www.moonsociety.org/news/moon-announce-032003.html

(also the top "News" link on the home page). And we certainly
are all for cheaper access to space - we'll cheer all the way,
though it's not our specific focus as an organization.

Despite having contact information for several Moon Society board
members, John McKnight didn't bother to check any of these facts
before going into his rant there.

As Randall Severy, our chairman of the board put it, "We're all on
the same side. Honest."

Arthur Smith
Member, Moon Society Board of Directors

On Thu, 15 May 2003, Ian Woollard wrote: