posted 02-22-2011 11:41 AM               

Three Journalists to Share Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award

Three journalists who have shaped the way the nation views and understands space have been selected to receive the Space Foundation's 2011 Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award, to be presented at the 27th National Space Symposium, at The Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colo., April 11. The recipients are:

• Jay Barbree, NBC News
  
• Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press
  
• William Harwood, CBS News

The Space Foundation annually presents the Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award to an individual, team or organization that has made significant contributions to public awareness of, and support for, space programs. The award's namesake was an Academy Award winning writer and producer, space advocate and early member of the board of directors of the Space Foundation.

The 2011 recipients have been at the forefront of space news coverage — via television, print publications and online — and through their commentary have helped the nation understand complex scientific information, deal with national tragedy and experience the triumph of discovery and accomplishment.

About Barbree
NBC News Correspondent Jay Barbree is the only journalist to have covered every manned U.S. space launch: a total of 163 Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle missions. He joined NBC in 1958 as a part-time space program reporter based at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., eventually moving to full-time and spending his entire career in Florida covering space. In the early 1980s, he was one of 40 finalists selected to the NASA Journalist in Space program, which was discontinued after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He was part of the NBC News Space Unit that won an Emmy award for NBC's coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, was the first journalist to report on the cause of the Challenger accident and was among the first to break the news of NASA concerns about foam striking the Space Shuttle Columbia's left wing during ascent -- the incident that led to the Columbia accident in 2003. Barbree is the author or co-author of eight books, including two memoirs, collaborations with astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton and other non-fiction works about space.

About Dunn
Aerospace writer Marcia Dunn has covered the space beat for The Associated Press since 1990. By the time the Space Shuttle program ends this year, she will have witnessed and written about 99 Shuttle flights. She also has reported on two launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. In 1995, she was among the first group of U.S. journalists allowed into the Cosmodrome for a manned Russian Soyuz launch. In 2003, she received the Associated Press Managing Editors' top deadline reporting prize for her coverage of the Columbia accident. Dunn is featured in one of the Sally Ride Science series of career books for youngsters, "Cool Careers in Space Sciences." She is based at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

About Harwood
CBS News Space Consultant William Harwood has covered America's space program full time for more than 27 years, focusing on Space Shuttle operations, planetary exploration and astronomy. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood provides up-to-the-minute space reports for CBS News and regularly contributes to CNET, Spaceflight Now and The New York Times. A prolific blogger, Harwood writes, edits and maintains CBS News:space, which provides detailed information about space exploration, statistics, demographic data and coverage of planetary exploration across the solar system, with a goal of providing a high level of detail and objectivity.

About the Morrow Award
Designed to recognize those who have made significant contributions to public understanding of, and support for, space programs, the Morrow Award has a long list of distinguished recipients: astronaut Eileen Collins, actor/director Tom Hanks, the X PRIZE Foundation, space artist Robert T. McCall, the late Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett Roddenberry, the crew of Space Shuttle Mission STS-95, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and, in 2010, actor/director Leonard Nimoy.

About the 27th National Space Symposium
The annual Space Foundation National Space Symposium brings together all sectors of space to highlight accomplishments and address opportunities and issues facing the global space community today. The Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award is one of several honors to be presented during the Symposium.