Blink and you'll miss it

This is hardly news at this point: SpaceShipOne has unofficially won the Ansara X-Prize. You can read more, better commentary about it than I can provide, so I won't try. Instead, I've got a slightly different perspective to share.

When I remembered that the second flight for the X-Prize was today (should I be embarassed that it wasn't the first thing I thought of when I woke up?) I hustled downstairs to look for live coverage on TV. NBC? Nope. Fox? Nope. ABC? Nope. CBS? Nope. The Discovery Channel? CNN? CNN Headline News? Fox News? (I hope you can see the pattern.)

I finally found coverage on MSNBC, about the time that White Knight was taking off. They didn't go to minute-by-minute coverage until shortly before SSO separation, but I can't blame them for that; there's only so many times and ways you can say "they're still circling to gain altitude". However, they did go to continuous coverage a few minutes before SSO separation, and stayed with it until touchdown.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd have thought (or, rather, hoped) that one of the major news networks would have been following this. After all, they saw fit to broadcast the entire funeral procession for Ronald Reagan. I'm especially surprised that The Discovery Channel wasn't all over this. Yes, I'm sure they're not normally set up for live broadcasts, but IIRC they're owned (at least partially) by NBC, so it's not like they don't have access to resources.

(It just occurred to me that the fact that MSNBC was covering the flight may have had less to do with the "NBC" part than with the "MS" part, what with primary funding for SpaceShipOne coming from Paul Allen, one of the cofounders of Microsoft.)

I'm reminded of a night a month or so back when tornado sirens started sounding in our city. We were watching TV at the time, so we started flipping around the local affiliates for weather information. (How to identify a Kansas City resident: if tornado sirens go off in the daytime, we go outside to see if we can spot it; if they go off at night, we turn on the TV to watch the storm coverage.) Everybody was broadcasting regularly scheduled programming. Finally, one of the affiliates broke in with weather coverage, and stayed with it until the storm had passed. Only one.