🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <37951@ames.arc.nasa.gov> yee@trident.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) writes:
>
>This is NASA Headline News for Tuesday, December 12....
>
>Navstar will circularize the orbit on Wednesday.  It's the eighth 
>Delta launch this year.

Unmanned strikes again!  Delta launches cost probably one-fifth to 
one-tenth of a Shuttle launch, depending on whose accounting you want
to believe.

Now of course these launchers are old technology, older even than
Shuttle.  The difference is that Delta is scaled properly; Shuttle is
a monstrosity.

>
>A NASA high-altitude balloon will carry four astronomical 
>instruments aloft from Ross Island in the Antarctica later this 
>month.   The New York Times says one of the instruments is a 
>large new-type cosmic ray telescope.  The experiment will exploit 
>Antarctica's unique physical qualities for research.  The balloon 
>will take the instrument package up to 100,000 feet altitude and 
>then drift westward along the 78th parallel completing a trip 
>around the Earth in about two weeks.     

What???  Unmanned probes in Antartica???  Henry, we gotta putta
stop to this!  Soon they're gonna be _everywhere_!  :-)

>NASA's space activities in Florida provided that state's economy 
>with a $1.24 billion boost in fiscal year 1989.  Over 18,000 
>workers were employed during the year at the NASA field center.  
>Of that number 2400 were civil service.  

That's probably an order of magnitude less than drug smuggling.  ;-)
Seriously, it all comes out of the pockets of other states.


**** These opinions are not related to Big Blue's ********

-- 
---------------------------
Nick Szabo
szabonj@ibmpa.tcspa.ibm.com
uunet!ibmsupt!szabonj