Despite ample reporting to the contrary, multiple news outlets are still running misleading new articles claiming that a NASA astronaut is still in the hospital after returning from the International Space Station on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
If you take it from headlines seen in the Daily Mail, Salt Lake City’s KSL-TV, or the random Argentinian news site El Diario 24, the unnamed ISS crew member who was rushed along with their three crewmates to a Pensacola hospital on October 25 is still there.
The problem? NASA itself announced just a day after those initial reports that the astronaut returned home to Houston after just one day, with a clean bill of health and the ability to “resume normal post-flight reconditioning with other crew members.”
Soon after, outlets like The Guardian, Space.com, and Ars Technica all picked up the stories in a timely manner — but for whatever reason, those headlines came up much lower on Google News than this wave of far sketchier ones.
This issue not only happened on Google Search, but also — albeit to a somewhat lesser extent — when we searched “NASA astronaut hospitalized” on Apple News as well.
Notably, none of the offending articles made any reference to the recent updates about the health of the astronaut, whose name NASA chose not to release to protect their identity and medical status.
Despite not including those important details, the Daily Mail did add a bit of detail about a NASA safety panel seeming to chide SpaceX for vaguely described “anomalies” that occurred on its crafts in the wake of the hospitalizations. Ironically enough, however, that panel comment came after the astronaut was released.
As for SLC’s KSL-TV, the issue at hand is obvious: the outlet appears to have just run a syndicated Associated Press story about the astronaut hospitalizations on November 4 — even though the piece itself was published October 25, making it woefully out of date.
The Argentinian El Diario site, meanwhile, remains more of a conundrum. Though the site is based in the South American country, it was published in English and was posted under the peculiar byline “More M,” which has on its author page several NASA-related posts, though only dating back to November 2.
Moreover, the text from the El Diario article reads strangely, as though it might have been generated or translated using AI.
We’ve reached out to both Google and Apple to ask why these sketchy sources are being promoted over newer, more legitimate news.
If we had to hazard a guess about what’s going on here, however, we’d say it’s little more than junky content farms or ailing local news sites exploiting search engine optimization (SEO) to get their crap seen before the real thing.
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