[jstarfish]

The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on.

The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric.

It's writing for television, where any yes/no question always happens to take exactly 30 minutes (and multiple commercial breaks) to answer, starting with the history of philosophy and reason itself.

It's scummy behavior, like timeshare sales or giving people free samples of spicy beef jerky and making them wait in line for water.

The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. Then you'd know what to expect. But they went the clickbait route, hence the irritation.

[Cheer2171]

> The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on.

It is highly relevant to the story. I was asking myself "So why was he even on this space mission?" You may not have had this question, but the main reason Wang gives for his state of mind around the incident is directly linked to his biography. He immigrated from China to the US at age 22, went into US academic science, and became a US citizen.

So he was in a position to be the first Chinese person in space, and he feels like a representative of all Chinese people. I see a lot of my father in him, who immigrated to the US around the same time and holds a lot of those conflicted feelings. The reason he threatened to not come back, in his own words, was not because he really cared about doing the science or because the result was really important even to him personally. It was because he would be failing in the eyes of the world. The words of his father (speaking in his head) to not bring shame to his family were more influential than the words of NASA mission command telling him to follow orders (speaking in his ear).

If you don't think where someone was born (China) and then went to school (USA) matters given this, then you have missed a big point of this article because you tried to speedrun long-form journalism.

[_Algernon_]

None of that is relevant to what I want to get out of an article titled "What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?" If I wanted a bunch of random facts or life stories I'd use the random option on Wikipedia.

[hutzlibu]

Random people are not flying with the Space Shuttle. And when people who do fly go nuts - then everything about this person is helpful to understand the "why" and how to prevent such a situation in the future. Of course NASA did that professionally already long ago - but now it is debated in the open. So some people deeply interested with the field, will want to play hobby psychoanalyst with the given facts. The more the better. You clearly don't want to and that is also OK, but maybe accept that some people like it like this. And just as a suggestion, you can nowdays get a AI to give you a short summary ...

[hutzlibu]

"The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric."

But there was and is just no definite answer, except for drama. I found every bit interesting and relevant to be able to picture the situation.

"The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. "

And no, because it was way more severe than this: he said he won't come home and he said figurativly "oh, I can just open this airlock and then we all would die?" (where "unless you give in to my demands" was maybe intentionally implied - maybe not, he was not mentally stable)

So an actual clickbaity sounding headline, that would have actually be quite close to the truth, would be:

"First man in space, who threatened to kill everyone on board"

But Ars did not do this. Partly because they are not (so much) into the clickbait game, but partly because the facts are (intentionally by NASA) not that clear here. And the Author tried to gather as much facts as he could. So giving us, where he was born and went to school was no real answer to the title question - but it helped me getting a picture of the person in question, which is still alive, but who refused to comment. Because people have reasons for why they act like they do:

"When I turned on my own instrument, it didn't work," Wang said. "You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don't just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, 'What's the matter with you? Can't you even do an experiment right?' I was really in a very desperate situation"