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From: dant@mrloog.LA.TEK.COM (Dan Tilque;1893;92-101;)
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: 20-year anniversary
Message-ID: <3771@teklds.TEK.COM>
Date: 5 Aug 88 00:23:31 GMT
References: <3763@teklds.TEK.COM> <2087@silver.bacs.indiana.edu> <11289@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Sender: nobody@teklds.TEK.COM
Reply-To: dant@mrloog.LA.TEK.COM (Dan Tilque)
Organization: Church of Christ, PhD., OBE, FRS, RCMP
Lines: 47

In article <11289@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> jec@iuvax.UUCP (James E. Conley) writes:
>>In article <3763@teklds.TEK.COM> dant@mrloog.LA.TEK.COM (Dan Tilque) writes:
>><Next year will be the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 and I'm sure that
>><everyone would like to celebrate it.  It never hurts to be prepared in
>><advance, so lets start to kick ideas around.
>>
>><My idea is that they launch Discovery on or before July 20, 1989, even 
>><if its faucets do leak.  Any others?
>
>I would hope that NASA would cancel the launch if there we any unreasonable
                                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>possibility of failure.  Last thing we need to be remindered is how twenty
>years ago we would put men on the moon, and now all we can do is scatter
>them over the Atlantic Ocean.

Perhaps you mean "reasonable".  But then since you seem to agree with
the current NASA administration, perhaps you do mean "unreasonable".
This is not a flame just at you, there were several others who expressed
similar sentiments.

My purpose in posting the original article was two-fold.  One was that
it's now a good time to start thinking about a 20-year celebration.  I
think it's unfortunate that we don't have some major new project ready
to go (or already underway) at that time.  (How many of you would have
predicted the current state of the U.S. space effort 20 years ago?)

My other purpose was to indicate that at the rate the Discovery testing
is going, they won't launch before the end of the century.  Every day I
open the newspaper and read about a new leak setting the launch back
another week or so.  It seems like NASA is trying for a Perfect launch;
something which anyone with common sense will tell you is virtually 
impossible.  After all, there's always the "unreasonable" possibility of
it being hit by a meteor on its way up.

Anyway, many of the delays are caused by things which would not have
caused delays in pre-Challenger launches.  I'm not saying that they
should ignore every one of them, but their hyper-cautiousness is
becoming ridiculous.


---
Dan Tilque	--	dant@twaddl.LA.TEK.COM

P.S. It occurred to me after I wrote this that maybe there's an SDI test
scheduled next July.  Then we could claim that the test is our
celebration.  I can't think of anything more reflective of our current
space effort than to blow up a satellite.