It’s important to acknowledge your mistakes. In a 1920 editorial, the New York Times attacked Robert Goddard’s claim that a rocket would work in space:

That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

In 1969, days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, it published this correction:

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere.

It added: “The Times regrets the error.”