THE BBC’S SCIENCE REPORTING gets a brutal Fisking from NasaWatch over basic and obvious factual errors in a story about Burt Rutan’s new private space venture.

Note that the BBC has fixed the errors without any indication that they were ever there, something that we also saw earlier in its coverage of Abu Abbas and Leon Klinghoffer. I’m not sure whether I’d condemn that or not — you want people to fix things, after all. I often fix posts shortly after they’re posted without indicating it. If they’ve been up long enough that it’s not an on-the-spot fix, and if the fix is of the sort that might turn someone else’s link to it nonsensical, then I indicate it in an update. If it’s just cosmetic, like fixing a typo, I don’t.