🚀 go-pugleaf

I would like to comment on two points in James Fletcher's speech
to the Explorers Club, posted by Steve Willner <willner@cfa250.harvard.edu>.

>        Even the games of children rely on computers commonplace 
>today but that only twenty years ago had not yet been invented 
>for our first tentative Apollo expeditions to the Moon.

Why is he saying this? The only reason I can think of is to imply
that it was the Apollo programme that drove the development of computers.
I don't think that that was true at all.

>          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.

This is even more questionable. The "possible growing crisis of climate"
I assume to be the question of the hole in the ozone layer and possible
overheating due to increases of CO2. The ozone data were first produced
by the British Antarctic Survey station at Halley Bay. A satellite
(I don't know which, NOAA??) had reported similar data but this
had been rejected as due to faulty sensors. To forstall nationalistic
comments, I am not saying this because it was the *British* Antarctic
Survey, but because it was on the ground. Similarly, I believe that
the best data showing long-term CO2 increases come from the mountain-top
observatory in Hawaii (whose name I vaguely know but can't spell :-).

I am not saying this to be anti-space, but these seem poor examples to
use in support of the current space program.

	Peter Ilieve			peter@memex.co.uk
					Memex Information Systems Ltd.
					East Kilbride, Scotland

Standard disclaimer: these are my comments, nothing to do with Memex.