Re: OT: A bit of a long shot, but

On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:12:57 -0700, in sci.electronics.design John
Larkin <jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


I wonder how many hundred billion dollars more, and how many more
lives, we will lose before we abandon that idiotic idea. Return on
investment so far has been zero.

John

Indirect gains may have occured, like the ability to service the
Hubble telescope, which has been a great benefit to astronomical
science.




One Hubble repair mission costs more than launching another space
telescope, or 10 times more than building a ground-based
adaptive-optics telescope of superior resolution. So we have one
ailing Hubble when we could have launched a new one every year and
done several times as much science, without killing crews.


I dont think the Ultra deep field thing or UV stuff could be done from
the surface.


NASA's unmanned science missions have been spectacular and economical;
the men-in-space stuff has been insanely expensive, deadly, and
absolutely useless.

That's not true. There are a lot of experiments which cannot be done
on earth because of the gravity. You may benefit from past experiments
every day without even knowing it :-)

Do you know of any microgravity experiments that yielded anything
useful? As far as I know, the flame/semiconductor/crystal-growing
things all turned out to be useless. I think they did prove that
insects can mate in zero-G.


What is the point of doing an experiment, if you already know the
outcome?


The shuttle and ISS are consuming the budget that should go to science
and weather. We're running out of hurricane tracking satellites, and
one shuttle mission would buy several of them, saving lives instead of
risking them.

Stop a war or two.It might release some funds.

Vote for a president who has at least a vague concept of an atom, or
even what a chemistry set from the 1950's does, apart from making
oil

And NASA has a long history of taking credit for things they actually
didn't do.

John




martin
.

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