See also this Reddit page (found here) in which this post includes:
The "paper" is on the NASA technical reports server because its author is the director of Science and Technology office at NASA Marshall space center. He is a CEO-level manager.
The mistake in the paper is in the undergraduate-level physics.
[...]
But lots of even good students make silly mistakes -- it is super common. Fortunately their mistakes do not get sensationalized like this one has become. It's a huge face-palm.
in it's extensive criticism of the overpopularization of the talk.
