The Huffington Post published a gentle “warning” in its Science section Thursday night that a piece of space debris was going to collide with the earth on Friday the 13th. Writer Jim Wild clearly states that this particular piece of debris, known as WT1190F, would burn up in the atmosphere on reentry, likely off the south coast of Sri Lanka.
While Wild wrote that “Friday the 13th is going to be a bad day for that particular piece of space junk,” someone at the Huffington Post in search of an image of falling “space junk” to accompany the story settled on a famous shot of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
Pretty sure HuffPo is displaying Columbia shuttle disaster photo with story of falling space junk pic.twitter.com/4oZlZuuVkf
— Joe Coussan (@JCouss) November 13, 2015
Donald Trump’s former intern just keeps turning up everywhere.
Cool kids at #HuffPo using a pic from Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in a post about space debris. https://t.co/qn3Phfnby4
— Craig Hlavaty (@CraigHlavaty) November 13, 2015
@gabrielmalor More classiness.
— Richard Cox (@RichardBCox) November 13, 2015
@gabrielmalor @JCouss WT ever lovin F.
— Cheryl Ghiselin (@CherylGhiselin) November 13, 2015
@gabrielmalor Anyone have the original link so we can demand an apology?
— Tonya Vlasik (@lawgirl) November 13, 2015
@gabrielmalor @JCouss wow. This is what you get when Interns use Google to get clip art.
— Mark Sawyer (@CarlSpakler2) November 13, 2015
Editor’s note: This post originally referred to the Challenger disaster, not the Columbia disaster, and has been corrected. The author apologizes for the mistake and doesn’t have an intern to blame.