So much for fact checking before releasing an article... You'd think that
such facts would be easy for any journalist to check, considering the "fact"
was of a non-technical nature.

Sadly, "unprecedented" to a journalist seems to mean "I don't remember
it happening" or "It's been at least 2 or 3 years" or the like.

Now, I'll give them a bit of credit - checking such a fact is hard.
In the case of astronauts, you "only" have to look through the records
of a few hundred flights and people (which probably aren't *that* hard
to find, but not super-easy necessarily). In the case of other fields
it might be ever less clear where you'd start (did anyone ever attempt
to jump over a canyon in a rocketcar before Evel Knievel? Or some
such).

But they could just stop saying "unprecedented" all the time.