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From: szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo)
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: space news from Oct 6 AW&ST
Message-ID: <20662@crg5.UUCP>
Date: 10 Dec 90 04:18:06 GMT
References: <1990Dec4.025945.15482@zoo.toronto.edu> <20634@crg5.UUCP> <1990Dec6.174515.2343@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Dec07.153442.14503@chinet.chi.il.us> <20657@crg5.UUCP> <1990Dec9.234706.9029@zoo.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo)
Organization: Sequent Computer Systems, Inc
Lines: 46

In article <1990Dec9.234706.9029@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <20657@crg5.UUCP> szabo@crg5.UUCP (Nick Szabo) writes:
>>... What goes around comes around, astronaut fans.  We are entering
>>a new era where the funding proportions for "manned" stunts and real
>>exploration and industry will be reversed, leading to a new Space Age...
>
>Not if the Planetary Society has its way, since one of their big priorities
>is the biggest and most short-sighted manned stunt in the history of space
>travel:  the one-shot international manned Mars mission.

Obvious observation #1: 
    There is no way anybody is going to fund a $400 billion Mars mission
    when NASA can't even launch a lousy space station and the Soviet
    empire is crumbling.  But talking about it makes for dramatic political
    rhetoric (and gives Dan Quayle something harmless to do :-)

Obvious observation #2:
    The Planetary Society is dominated by the people who did Voyager, Viking,
    etc. that explored most of the solar system using the crumbs falling
    off of Apollo.

Straightforward deduction:
    What a better way to get more crumbs than promote a Mars mission?  
    NASA or LLNL (take your pick, LLNL hasn't gotten around to launching
    SDI either) take another 10 years to underestimate cost, misdesign and 
    remisdesign a hopeless chemical Mars mission.  Meanwhile, JPL gets to 
    design and launch a new generation of probes, first to Mars, then 
    everywhere else when folks start realizing what a failure the manned 
    program is.  A higher-tech repeat of Apollo, with the manned part 
    cancelled before it leaves the CAD.  With instruments orders of 
    magnitude better than those on Voyager, we gather an unprecedently huge 
    amount of data for a starving generation of planetary scientists.

It's a perfect strategy, and hopefully the death of Fred will alleviate 
the need for this kind of politics.  But until then, IMHO the Planetary
Society is a group of geniuses trying to get the best they can out of
a bloated, scientifically illiterate bureaucracy, and doing a pretty 
good job considering the odds.

   

-- 
Nick Szabo			szabo@sequent.com
"We live and we learn, or we don't live long" -- Robert A. Heinlein
The above opinions are my own and not related to those of any
organization I may be affiliated with.