On Fri, 7 Feb 2003 16:46:35 -0800, Sean Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Except that the HST and the Station were both planned in concert with >the Shuttle and were cited as evidence of what great things the Shuttle >could do. Of course, at this point we're building ground-based >telescopes that will outperform HST, and at a fraction of the cost. True - already are outperforming HST, in fact. See Mar 2002 Sky & Tel for a Dec 2001 VLT NAOS-CONICA image that shows sharper and fainter stars than HST. Granted, that's in the IR band (2.2 um), but it's still impressive, and similar visible light performance will be here soon, with a sodium laser artificial guide star. But HST was launched in 1990. Would it have been worthwhile to wait over eleven years to save a large fraction of a billion dollars? ...Yeah, probably. Nuts. >I read the entire article from beginning to end, Randall. I don't think >you did before posting your response. You're correct. Having read his recent screed, I couldn't force myself to finish his historical one. Both are chock full of errors, and of Ideology presented as Truth. >Did I mention lobbying? Campaigning, lobbying, slippery slope. Rather not go there. >Does the Infernal Revenue Code prohibit ERPS >members from public expressing opinions? Does it prevent us from posting >in big letters on our web site that we don't think the Shuttle program >is a good idea? Of course not. But I don't believe we should do the latter. >> Remember: we're not trying to defeat NASA. We're trying to obsolesce >> them. > >So you think that the government's competing with commercial launchers >and giving NASA a monopoly on military launches doesn't hurt the >commercial space industry? Since when does NASA do military launches? The military never relied on NASA for launches except for being dragged kicking and screaming into launching everything on Shuttle - and after Challenger they said, "Congress, we told you so; NASA, get stuffed," and went back to launching their own missions. >You think we can "obsolesce" NASA without >doing anything about the hurdles thrown in the face of the industry by >the very agency that's supposed to be supporting/encouraging it? AFAIK, NASA has no charter to support or encourage commercial space development. That's FAA/AST. NASA usually gets Congressional orders to support commercial space in their budget allocations, but they usually ignore them, and for some reason Congress lets them. In any case, I believe that trying to do something about those hurdles by trying to shut down America's only national space program would be counterproductive, and would only further marginalize us. If Lockmart and Boeing want to try it, more power to them. For us, I think it would be dumb. It amounts to a frontal assault against someone who could outspend us by a factor of a billion. We must be more subtle. For example, we could take every opportunity to give extremely left-handed compliments to Nixon's White Elephant and Goldin's Empire. Something like, "Considering what a marginal vehicle Shuttle is, it's a great tribute to NASA that they've been able to fly it for over 20 years and only lose 40% of the fleet." :-) >Remember, these people are using *our* money to compete against us. It >seems to me that any comprehensive program intended to produce cheap >private access to space must take this into account. Indeed it must - by recognizing that the government competition is not going to go away, and anyone who goes head to head with them is going to lose. The secret to success in competing with government is to cooperate with them until you can beat them at their own game. Then get a bunch of their people to defect, and make them irrelevant. I think the bottom line for me is that I don't want to see ERPS attacking anyone or anything. We should leave that to Rick. Our role, IMHO, is to show the world what can be done using a model other than NASA's. Eventually, if we are right that we have the better model, ours will prevail. -R -- Every complex, difficult problem has a simple, easy solution - which is wrong. [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
