Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!yamauchi
From: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: Peter flames Henry
Message-ID: <1989May9.011932.23900@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 9 May 89 05:19:31 GMT
References: <11360@well.UUCP> <1989Apr23.000034.7797@utzoo.uucp> <2555@phred.UUCP> <1989Apr26.232428.3073@utzoo.uucp> <2562@phred.UUCP> <4359@ttidca.TTI.COM> <2570@phred.UUCP> <1989May9.013926.13621@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 42

In article <1989May9.013926.13621@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <2570@phred.UUCP> petej@phred.UUCP (Pete Jarvis) writes:
>> ...How
>>about Canada and the United States integrating in a team effort to send
>>something to Mars? Share the cost? Or is that asking too much.
>
>So long as Congress insists that the US must be able to go it alone on
>everything just in case, it probably is.  Canada's contribution to the
>space station is being essentially duplicated by NASA, on direct orders
>from Congress, at your expense.  And one guess why the station will have
>three different laboratory modules?  Right the first time:  one each from
>JSA, ESA, and NASA, because the US wouldn't let ESA or JSA build anything
>vital to the station.  Nobody in his right mind is going to expect the
>US to participate in an "integrated team effort".  At least with ESA we
>don't get this kind of nonsense (much).

Despite the fact that Congress is usually a pretty brain-dead institution,
in this case I have to agree that this might be a good idea.

In international ventures, the potential for governmental screw-ups is
cumulative.  So, if P(G) is the probability that government G will
avoid doing anything really stupid to kill the project, and a project
has to depend on governments G1, G2, ..., GN, the chance of the
project succeeding is:

P(G1) * P(G2) * ... * P(GN)

(remember that for all x, P(x) < 1, and in the case of governments
P(G) << 1)

In other words, about a snowball's chance in hell. :-/

I'm not saying that Congress is any more reliable than any foreign
legislature, but as bad as it is to have to rely on Congress, it's
exponentially worse to rely on Congress *and* the Canadian legislature
*and* the British Parliament *and* .....

_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi				University of Rochester
yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu		Computer Science Department
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