Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!rice!titan!phil From: phil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle Subject: Re: Discovery's launch: Am I imagining things? Message-ID: <1946@kalliope.rice.edu> Date: 2 Oct 88 16:38:53 GMT References: <1104@cfa237.cfa250.harvard.edu> <4305@cadnetix.COM> <1925@cloud9.UUCP> Sender: usenet@rice.edu Reply-To: phil@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Organization: Rice University, Houston Lines: 49 In article <1925@cloud9.UUCP> cme@cloud9.UUCP (Carl Ellison) writes: >I sure wish NASA would present a full explanation for both of these >so we could stop speculating via USENET and get back to watching TV. I sure wish you Usenet readers would exercise a little patience and give NASA a break! I just don't believe some of what I have read here the past few days. Everything from "back to their same old tricks" to rumors of a conspiracy initiated by the President's office. Come ON! Had it ever occurred to anyone out there that it might just possibly be true that NASA doesn't KNOW the answer? Had it ever occurred to anyone out there that they don't want to present the public with nothing more than speculation and half-guesses? Why don't you give them some time to (a) evaluate the film clips (possibly comparing them to previous flights) and (b) scrutinize the SRBs? I would much rather wait for NASA to give me a well researched, provable and correct answer than a half-baked hard-pressed the-public-has-a-right-to-know-yesterday answer. The launch was only Thursday, folks. Cut 'em some slack. The real people (the engineers and technicians) want to see the space program succeed just as much as you and I. They are just as interested (if not more so) in how well the SRBs performed as we are. After all, some of them have a close comraderie with the astronauts. Those people sitting at the top of that giant firecracker are *friends*. They don't want to lose them either. The press asked about the plume as early as the post-launch briefing. OF COURSE no one is going to have an answer. The SRBs have just barely splashed down! Look at the spot they were put in: if they immediately answer "oh, that's a common phenomenon---we see it all the time" and then find out that there really was a problem with an SRB, they are going to look very bad. And the public (especially the Usenetters) will accuse them of attempting to cover up a known problem. If they answer "that could be a serious problem" the press will jump all over it, mnake it sound far more serious than it is and public opinion of the revamped space program will go down the tubes along with the last remnants of faith and hope that any american still had for the manned space program. If they answer "we don't know yet---we need to study the problem" everyone screams at them for trying to hide information from the public. Like I said before: give NASA a break! And once they do decide to make a statement about this, you had better watch the entire press conference via NASA Select. Because I'm sure that the uneducated media will twist and turn the words to make it sound very much unlike what was really said. I have already experienced so many misrepresentations of the truth by the media in the past 4 days to shatter any faith I ever had in the press. But that's for another message.... William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University