1/Only difference vs. pre-Internet: pre-Internet, planetary mission launches were hardly covered at all. Checked Nexis re: '97 Cassini launch. LAT was there, WaPo used Bill Harwood. Seth Borenstein of Orlando Sentinel. CNN was live.
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2/But that was about it for reporters at the Cape. This is what the New York Times ran about the launch in the next day's paper.pic.twitter.com/TSw96l1FH7
3/Launch is the least interesting part of the mission (unless it blows up, of course). All of the work designing and building the spacecraft has been done elsewhere already. All of the important science is yet to come.
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4/Because you can cover NASA events from Brooklyn or Topeka or LA, there is now a lot more coverage of space. That is good.
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5/Sometimes there is great value at being there. I was at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab for the Pluto flyby (sure as hell wasn't going to miss that). I was at Caltech for the end of Cassini, got great stories, impossible to do remotely.
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