🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989May9.011932.23900@cs.rochester.edu> yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) writes:
>>So long as Congress insists that the US must be able to go it alone on
>>everything just in case...
>
>Despite the fact that Congress is usually a pretty brain-dead institution,
>in this case I have to agree that this might be a good idea.

Oddly enough, ESA seems to survive without it.  International collaboration
often makes it harder for a single government to do something stupid, since
that would piss off its partners.  (Foreign relations often have somewhat
higher priority than domestic science.)  The US is the only major country,
by and large, that feels itself above such considerations, and is perfectly
willing to screw up an ongoing project (as opposed to declining to join a
new one).

>In international ventures, the potential for governmental screw-ups is
>cumulative.  So, if P(G) is the probability that government G will
>avoid doing anything really stupid to kill the project...

Unfortunately, in recent history the big problem is P(USA), which is
rather small for international projects.  That tends to dominate the
probability of the whole thing going through.  Remember the International
Solar Polar Mission, now renamed Ulysses by thoroughly disgusted Europeans.
P(UK) has shown disturbing oscillations lately, but by and large this
hasn't caused ESA excessive problems.
-- 
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu