Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!bobmon
From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Space muzak (Mission Status Report  #12)
Message-ID: <18780@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 89 16:21:14 GMT
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Organization: malkaryotic
Lines: 31

yee@trident.arc.nasa.gov (Peter E. Yee) <22815@ames.arc.nasa.gov> :
-
-In a reversal of traditional procedure, the crew of Discovery 
-this morning "awoke" Mission Control with the theme song from the 
-popular television show "Star Trek" followed by congratulatory 
-comments from actor William Shatner who played Captain Kirk on 
-the show.  Flight controllers followed Discovery's message by 
-uplinking the fight songs from each crew members' college.

This sort of stuff is starting to bother me.  I am all in favor of doing fun
things in space, along with useful things... but I'm not (willingly)
contributing my tax dollars to pay for cutesy musical wakeup calls.

I expect that this is supposed to bring the program closer to the "average
American" or some such media-inspired nonsense.  But how does it look to
people who have a modicum of critical faculties, and aren't already
pro-space?  The Soviets are spending rubles to learn about human physiology
in weightless conditions; we're spending dollars to play 20-year-old tv
reruns!  Granted, this isn't all they did, it isn't even everything that was
in the "MISSION STATUS REPORT" -- it's just the lead item, and thereby
apparently the most important item to someone.  I was on vacation last week,
and got only minimal radio news.  This was indeed the only shuttle item I
heard.  If anything useful happened, that didn't make it out to the public.

This isn't going to inspire anyone to support a NASA budget; those of us
who want to go to space can wake up all by ourselves, those who think the
whole effort is a waste of money have confirming evidence in fluff like this.
--
Those who do not understand MSDOS are  | Bob Montante (bobmon@cs.indiana.edu)
condemned to write glowingly of it in  | Computer Science Department
slick, short-lived magazines.          | Indiana University, Bloomington IN