[Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series examining recent coverage of President Obama’s plans for the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The second part is here.]

Last week, President Obama plotted a major course change for NASA, scrapping the five-year-old Constellation project and its return trip to the moon, shifting responsibility for low-earth orbit transport to the private sector, and setting sights on a manned journey to a near-earth asteroid before a more distant trip to Mars.

In a speech Thursday at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Obama defended a refined version of a plan that was first floated in February. Critics had complained that the plan lacked a crystallizing mission-destination, would kill jobs in a weak economy, abandoned $10 billion already spent on Constellation, and put the onus on unproven private interests to develop a safe ship to ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.

Obama’s proposal marks a dramatic shift in the U.S. program for space exploration, worthy of debate. It’s unfortunate, then, but unfortunately not surprising, that some news outlets have turned questions of serious policy into political spaceballs. One week before Obama’s speech, a science reporter at FoxNews.com, who frequently provides a platform for climate change skeptics (examples here, here, here and here), zeroed in on long-standing plans to retire the deteriorating space shuttle this fall, a cost-saving (and perhaps life-saving) move that will force NASA to depend on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft for transportation to and from the space station.

Citing “experts,” FoxNews.com’s Gene J. Koprowski endeavors to re-stoke Cold War fears, writing that the policy “could hold America’s astronauts in orbit hostage to the whims of the Kremlin.” To back up the claim, Koprowski quotes Jane Orient, described as a science policy expert and professor at the University of Arizona. “The U.S. has surrendered its advantage in space, conceding the high ground to others who are probably our enemies,” Orient is quoted as saying. She continues, racheting up the bathos: “We are apparently leaving seven astronauts in space as hostages. Their loss would be a tragedy, but only a small part of the total disaster. It would symbolize the lack of respect that America has for its pioneers.”

First, a comment on sourcing: Orient is neither a science policy expert nor a professor at Arizona, although she has been a clinical lecturer in the university’s College of Medicine, according to the director of the public affairs office. She’s an internist and executive director of the fringe-conservative American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, who last appeared in the news filing suit against the recent health policy legislation. The AAPS encourages doctors to opt out of Medicare and Medicaid, among other things. A Mother Jones article last fall, titled “The Tea Party’s Favorite Doctors,” reports that Orient worked with Philip Morris “to help the company’s ‘junk science’ campaign that attacked indoor smoking bans,” cranking out “’third party press releases’ in support of its agenda.” She is also a faculty member at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, whose staff members are involved in the Petition Project, “opposed, on scientific grounds, to the hypothesis of ‘human-caused global warming’ and to concomitant proposals for world-wide energy taxation and rationing.” Her credibility on space policy issues is nil.

Brett Norman is a reporter for Politico.