Boeing may have used a lobbying firm to plant an op-ed slamming SpaceX

One of SpaceX’s Falcon 9
rockets launches toward space.

SpaceX
via Flickr (public domain)

• Boeing
  and SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, are competing for
  lucrative
  NASA contracts to launch astronauts into space.
• An opinion piece criticizing SpaceX and
  its rocket-fueling procedures has appeared in multiple news
  outlets since July.
• A story by Ars Technica
  suggested Boeing might be helping to place the opinion pieces
  via a Washington lobbying firm called Law Media Group.
• The piece’s author, Richard Hagar, formerly worked for a
  company bought by Boeing and told Business Insider that he sent
  the opinion piece to a Boeing employee — and no one else.

Boeing, a 102-year-old titan of the aerospace industry, is in a
heated competition with SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, for
billions of dollars in NASA contracts.

At a time when Boeing is seeking to secure that taxpayer funding
— and the prestige of launching astronauts into space — the
company might be secretly placing an op-ed that criticizes SpaceX
in newspapers around the US.

Both companies are currently trying to show NASA they can safely
launch the agency’s astronauts to and from the
International Space Station (ISS) as part of NASA’s
Commercial Crew Program, a roughly $8-billion competition the
agency launched to spur private companies to build safe,
cost-effective, American-made spaceships.

Through that program, SpaceX
won a $2.6 billion contract to develop its
Crew Dragon space capsule, and Boeing got $4.8 billion for
its
CST-100 Starliner space capsule. SpaceX hopes to launch its
first Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts in early 2019, and
Boeing expects to test-launch its first astronauts after
mid-2019.

A
test of SpaceX’s Dragon v2 capsule thrusters.

SpaceX/Flickr
(public domain)

If these initial missions are successful, NASA is prepared to
award potentially billions of dollars more in space-taxi
contracts through the mid-2020s (each crewed flight is likely
worth several hundred million dollars).

To that end, as Ars Technica’s Eric Berger
reported on Thursday, some evidence suggests a Washington PR
firm that counts Boeing as a client may be attempting to
negatively sway public opinion about SpaceX via a critical op-ed
that began to appear in newspapers around the country in
July. 

Business Insider has found a link between Boeing and the
article’s author.

The negative SpaceX op-ed

The reason that so much NASA funding is at stake for Boeing and
SpaceX is that the space agency hasn’t been able to transport its
own astronauts to the ISS since July 2011, when its space shuttle
fleet retired. According to some estimates, each shuttle launch
cost the space agency
roughly $1.5 billion, accounting for development costs.

For now,
increasingly expensive Russian rocket ships are the only way
to get astronauts into space. That’s why the Commercial Crew
program was created: to spur the creation of American-made
spaceships, create competition in the industry, and ideally drive
down launch costs. 

NASA astronauts have been
working closely with both Boeing and SpaceX as they develop
new methods of space travel. The first NASA astronauts who will
fly the companies’ spaceships were
named on August 3.

Nine
astronauts will fly the first four crewed missions inside SpaceX
and Boeing’s new spaceships for NASA, called Crew Dragon and
CST-100 Starliner, respectively.

NASA
via AP

But just before the announcement, on July 22, an opinion article
by an aerospace-industry veteran named Richard
Hagar ran
in The Washington Times, a right-leaning publisher. The op-ed
paints Musk as inexperienced and castigates “special interests in
Washington” for eschewing the development of commercial safety
standards. It also argues that SpaceX’s plans to fuel its Falcon
9 rockets while astronauts are already loaded into the ship on
top — a practice called “load-and-go” — is unsafe.

A short bio of Hagar that accompanies the op-ed describes him as
someone who “worked on every Apollo mission for NASA at the
Kennedy Space Center as a spacecraft operator on the launch
team.”

That much is true. But an important aspect of Hagar’s
professional identity is also this: He formerly worked for an
aerospace company called North American Aviation. That company
later became Rockwell International, which was bought by Boeing
in the 1990s. So Hagar said Boeing now pays his pension.

“I’m a Boeing retiree, technically,” Hagar told Business Insider,
though we were unable to independently verify that his pension
checks come from Boeing. “I worked at the Cape [Canaveral], and I
keep in contact with Boeing people down there.”

In fact, Hagar said he never submitted the article to The
Washington Times. He only shared his written opinion with one
person: a Boeing employee, whom he repeatedly declined to
identify.

“I don’t want to start anything,” Hagar said. “I’m not interested
in that.”

Shortly after Hagar gave his op-ed to Boeing, he said, it
appeared in The Washington Times.

“I gave [Boeing] permission to publish it wherever,” Hagar said.
“I knew it would be in different publications, but not how many.”

The piece has since appeared in at least eight more publications.
The op-ed ran in the
Albuquerque Journal on August 31, the
Houston Chronicle on September 17 (and its partner the

San Francisco Chronicle through an automated system), and the

American Statesman on September 26. Members of the USA Today
network also ran
the
opinion piece.

“It’s surprising, it’s been going around the country,” Hagar
said. “I’m not out to try to get published everywhere. I have an
opinion on it, and I was asked about it.”

Business Insider asked Boeing about Hagar’s op-ed, but the
company did not provide a comment in time for publication. (We’ll
update this story if we receive a statement.)

NASA also did not respond to queries in time for publication.

What is the deal with ‘load-and-go’?

SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rockets with cryogenic or super-cold
propellants just before launch. That approach comes with a number
of cost-saving, mission-enabling advantages.

Waiting to fuel up keeps the rockets’ high-grade kerosene fuel,
called RP-1 very cold and very dense, allowing SpaceX to put more
of it into a rocket, achieve greater performance, and launch
bigger payloads deeper into space. The technique also helps
SpaceX reserve fuel to reignite the rocket’s boosters, land them
back on Earth, and make them available
to be reused.

In his opinion article, Hagar argues that the “load-and-go”
approach can’t be trusted. The longer astronauts are waiting with
fuel around, the thinking goes, the greater the likelihood of a
deadly accident. As evidence, he fingers SpaceX’s Sept. 2016

launch pad explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket.

An
explosion on the launch site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in Cape
Canaveral, Florida is shown in this still image from a video
taken September 1, 2016.
Launch
Report/Handout via REUTERS

“Congress and the administration should overturn these
shortsighted restrictions on commercial spaceflight safety
standards,” Hagar’s op-ed says, later adding: “NASA must ensure
that before they put an astronaut on a commercial spacecraft that
it lives up to the strict standards we have learned over the last
60 years of spaceflight.”

However, after nearly two years of work by SpaceX and an
exhaustive review by NASA, the space agency announced
on August 17 that SpaceX’s load-and-go fueling method
“presents the least risk” to astronauts. NASA approved the
practice, pending some final tests.

Yet even after that approval came through, Hagar’s op-ed kept
appearing in newspapers.

He never personally pitched the piece to any outlet, according to
his account. Several outlets that ran the op-ed did not respond
to our questions about who pitched the pieces, but The Washington
Times told Business Insider that the piece “was pitched by Kelly
Ramesar […] on behalf of Richard Hagar.”

Kelly Ramesar is the name of a communications associate at a
DC-based public relations firm called Law Media Group, or LMG,
according to the firm’s
website. LMG names Boeing as a client on its site. Ars
Technica reported that two other people whose names are listed as
communications associates at LMG — Casey Murray and Joshua
Bak-Brevik — also successfully pitched Hagar’s piece to at least
four news outlets. 

Given Hagar’s insistence that he only gave his writing to a
single Boeing employee, it seems someone from that company may
have passed it to LMG, though this remains unknown.

Julian Epstein, the CEO of LMG, did not immediately return
Business Insider’s calls or email. 

Why Hagar says he wrote the piece

Neither Boeing nor any other entity paid Hagar for his writing,
he said, though he’s fine with that.

“I’m 82 years old. Why would I do anything different than that?”
he said. “I have no money in this. It’s an opinion I have on that
process.”

Hagar said he had been thinking about the risks of load-and-go
for years, and had discussed his concerns with a small group of
retirees who used to work on the space program.

“I’m a Boeing supporter. But that doesn’t have any effect on my
opinion of the load-and-go process,” he said.

But changing the perception of SpaceX could influence NASA and
lawmakers who control the agency’s purse strings. And Hagar did
acknowledge that he wrote his article after a conversation with a
current Boeing employee (not a retiree in his group).

“I was talking to one of the Boeing people one time, and he asked
me what I thought of the load-and-go process,” Hagar said. “I
said, ‘Let me sit down and look at it in more detail.’ And that’s
how [the op-ed] came about.”

A
Falcon 9 rocket launches toward space using cryogenically cooled
fuel.

SpaceX/Flickr
(public domain)

SpaceX, for its part, has designed safety mechanisms to protect
astronauts if something were to go wrong with the load-and-go
procedure. An automated escape system in its Crew Dragon capsule
would, in theory, blast astronauts away from an exploding rocket
if there was a fueling mishap.

“I think that issue has been somewhat overblown,” Musk said
during a call with reporters on May 11, prior to NASA’s approval.

He added: “We certainly could load the propellants and then have
the astronauts board Dragon … But I don’t think it’s going to be
necessary, any more than passengers on an aircraft need to wait
until the aircraft is full of fuel before boarding.”

Despite Hagar’s criticism of load-and-go fueling, he said the
strategy is not a deal-breaker — just not the approach he
believes SpaceX should begin with to launch its first astronauts.
He said load-and-go can create pressure to avoid calling off a
launch, since doing so may incur extra expenses.

“If that process evolves to load-and-go, that’s great. But to
start out with that? It’s a process that can be awful critical.
It has to go perfectly,” Hagar said. “We lost Apollo 1, and we
lost Challenger, and we lost Columbia, and a lot of that’s all
based on cost. With commercial companies, I hope they have deep
pockets.”

 

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