🚀 go-pugleaf

Look in the back of *Pioneering the Space Frontier*, in the Acknowledgements
section, where the National Commisssion on Space lists in tiny tiny print
the many people who contributed to their effort.  There's a list called
"Letters and Computer Responses."  Among the hundreds of people listed there
are an extrordinary number from around here, especially Naperville, Illinois,
which is down the road.

When I think of Naperville, I think of Bell Labs, which makes me think of
UUCP.  Does anybody in this newsgroup know where all those Naperville responses
came from?  If there's somebody in my neighborhood generating this much
activity on space travel, I'd like to know about it.

Did somebody collect opinions over the networks and forward them to the
Commission? The text of the report mentions Compuserve, Astronet (the Young
Astronauts' BBS system), something called Terra Nova Communications, and
something called the Boulder Center for Science and Policy.  No mention is made
of Usenet or Arpanet.

It has been suggested to me that a local teacher or two might have organized a
letter-writing project, and certainly that would skew the distribution of
responses toward a particular locality.  This theory is supported by the
presence of a lot of Jennifers, Jessicas, and Ryans in the list, who could well
be the children of Eighties parents.  Even if this is the explanation, I'd like
to know who the teachers are.

Any light that readers can shed on this question will be appreciated.


                                        Bill Higgins
                                        Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
                                        HIGGINS@FNALCDF