Christian Montoya’s found yet another bad piece of Journalism from the Cornell Daily Sun in the form of their article C.U. Satellite Team Places in Qualifier by Ariel Estevez, a freshman English major. The article contains gems like:

Over 100 Cornell engineers have assembled to compete in the University Nanosat-4 Program, an Air Force-sponsored competition between 11 universities to build the best spacecraft. The university that wins the competition will have its satellite launched into space.

I didn’t know that satellites were considered spacecraft; it’s probably better to avoid ambiguous language. My favorite line, though, is:

According to Young, Cornell has lately been receiving a lot of attention from the space industry. The University has recently been in contact with multi-billion dollar corporations such as BORM, Northrop Grammar, Lockheed Martin and Orbital Science.

Yes, that should be Grumman, as Christian already has pointed out. I’m just amused to the hilt.

One Response to “The Truth on CUSat”

1. CUSAT Engineer says:

   10/30/2006 at 2:22 am

   The innacuracies are far worse than you know. For example, when asked what he thought the team’s chances of winning were, Kris Young is quoted as saying something like “Almost Zero”. That quote was taken completely out of context, as we beleive we have a very good chance of winning this competition, though if we had to rank ourselves at this point in time we would not be the front runner. The article also included a quote that, as they presented it, was a major insult to some fellow project teams. Paraphrasing, the quote stated that “we (CUSat, were actually doing something meaningful, not just building a car”. All the engineers working for the SAE fomula car team were not very pleased by that one. CUSat has requested that a retraction be made but the Sun has refused our request. We are instead submitting a letter to the editor which will hopefully be published to correct the article’s errors.

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