More on NASA's motives to fluff ArsenicGate

When the story now deservedly known as ArsenicGate broke, with NASA "fluffing" a mid-level exobiology story into something it wasn't even close to being, I blogged both about the bad science involved and how NASA's fluffery didn't stack up to the reality of claims about things like multiple evolutionary pathways. In both posts, I said that NASA had "good" motive for such fluffery, including, above all, the success at that very time of the first privately-funded orbital space flight. Well, here's a lot more on how NASA had motive to fluff this bad science. Read the whole thing, to be sure, but this image ought to say it all:

Inside NASA, some employees have taken to wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the letters "WWED," which stands for "What Would Elon Do?" — a reference to SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk, the Internet tycoon who invested his own fortune in pursuit of his dream of sending humans into space.

That's an agency hugely afraid for its future, and probably thinking it needs all the fluffery it can get, or do. But, per the story, NASA can do all the fluffery it want; that doesn't guarantee results.