🚀 go-pugleaf

In James Fletcher's speech to the Explorer's Club he states:
> ........We see the evidence of enormous engineering skills 
> in the roads and highways and aqueducts and canals that tied 
> together the early empires of Asia and Europe and South 
> America...
> ...What will we leave as valuable and as permanent to 
> those inheritor civilizations we will count as our inheritors?

To use a Reaganism -- there he goes again -- comparing infrastructure
based on mature engineering technology with the "infrastructure" 
being built by NASA.  Whatever we leave to our inheritors, it
will have little if anything to do with NASA as it currently
exists.  The sooner we get NASA out of the "infrastructure" 
business, the sooner business will be safe to start maturing the
engineering techniques of space infrastructure.  Maybe in 100 years
or so that technology will be mature enough for the government to
take over and do it on the scale of the interstate highway system
without screwing things up.

>         Space systems are so integral to our daily life as 
> to have become invisible--operational telecommunication, 
> navigation, and environmental monitoring space services are 
> embedded in our civilization.

All based on technology developed privately or by the military.
Typically, NASA attempts to parasitize the credibility of others.

>     The nature of space systems makes them particularly 
> suited to the study and investigation of our own planetary 
> processes; it is from space that we have gotten our earliest 
> warnings of the possible growing crisis of climate and it is only 
> from space that we will be able to fix upon and understand the 
> real extent and direction of environmental change.  

What James Fletcher fails to mention, for obvious reasons, is that
the Nimbus 7 data to which he refers, was withheld by NASA 
"scientists" from the rest of the world for 7 years because
they didn't want people to find out that the ozone hole was
real after NASA had discarded the data on the hole as erroneous.
It was ground-based researchers who, after refusing to disbelieve
their own evidence for a hole in the face of NASA's reports, forced
NASA to fess up about their fiasco.

>      I would point out that the accomplishments of the past and 
> the continuing promises of the future have come at an 
> astonishing low price for the values received--this year, for 
> example, the entire NASA space and aeronautics program represents 
> less than 1% of the Federal budget.  

Such stupendous accomplishments as:
* Spending 8 times the budget of the NSF per year while producing 
1/8 the technical returns.
* Actively killing off all alternatives to the Shuttle both existing and 
proposed.
* Budgeting $20 million dollars for private launch services and claiming
before the Space Sciences subcommittee with an arrogant grin that this
is all that is needed at this time (Fletcher in response to a question
by Congressman Ron Packard). PS: A single private launch costs about
4 times that amount.
* Blowing up a teacher/mother live on national TV before the expectant
eyes of tens of millions of school children, who now have nightmares about
space instead of dreams.  Even if the launch had been a success we would
have believed NASA was bringing the space frontier to average Americans
so it was a good gamble in any case.
* The above mentioned cover-up of ozone-layer destruction during the
7 years of human history in which the most chloroflourocarbons were
dumped into the atmosphere.

1% of the Federal budget!?  The Defense Department should be envious
of the destructive power weilded by NASA on such a paltry $10 billion/yr.

>                         The program we are trying so hard 
> to bring to fruition is an integral, interdependent whole--and, 
> therefore, vulnerable to serious dislocation in the face of even 
> small perturbations.  

Quite by design.  Setting everything up to be totally interdependent
guarantees political support for every part from every other part
regardless of its merit.  This is known as programmatic hostage-taking
and NASA is getting better at it with each passing decade (yes I said
each passing DECADE, folks... time to wake up -- its been 20 years
and almost $200 billion (1989) since Apollo).

...then after paragraphs of merciless yammering and big lies about
SPACE STATION FREEDOM, our hero from Utah, who made sure Morton Thiokol
with its seamed solid rocket segments would one day propel seven
astronauts to martyrdom, continues yammering...
>   ...Scholars will argue endless about why the Roman imperial 
> enterprise fell upon evil days; however, no one will seriously 
> argue with Santayana's observation on who may be condemned to 
> repeat an uncomfortable history. 

And we certainly don't want to discuss those reasons here,
especially since the most obvious among them is the fact that
the Roman decay manifest itself in cancerous bureaucratic growth.

I love James Fletcher... I really do.  His sleaze is so transparent
as to be touching.  If only all the bureaucrats in NASA were so
naive.  Well, we all need dreams.

UUCP: {cbosgd, hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, nosc}!crash!pnet01!jim
ARPA: crash!pnet01!jim@nosc.mil
INET: jim@pnet01.cts.com