Re: Hubble Marching orders

From: Greg Kuperberg (greg_at_see-web-page.edu)
Date: 01/29/05 

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 12:58:57 +0000 (UTC)

In article <41fb6418$0$11497$c0de7616@dsl.net>,
George William Herbert <gherbert@retro.com> wrote:
>Greg Kuperberg <greg@see-web-page.edu> wrote:
>>Alex Roland said at the very beginning of this story that the real
>>purpose of the Bush space vision was to sustain the space station and
>>only pretend to move on. It's like saying, "I am absolutely resolved
>>to quit smoking --- six years to the day from today!" [Henry's] complaint
>>is exactly consistent with Roland's take on it.
>Except that Station's growth has been solidly truncated for the
>forseeable future,...

For about the fifth time. But, as Robert Park pointed out many years
ago, the space station is a hydra: no matter how much you cut off, it
will just grow back. One reason for this is that the space station was
a mountain of wild promises from day one, when Reagan first announced it.

They aren't really truncating the space station unless they lay off a
lot of people. That is exactly what Washington still doesn't want to do.

>and Shuttle's lifespan has had its limit defined.

But not really. First, Bush is taking no responsibility to retire the
space shuttle himself; the next guy is supposed to do it. Second, in
the face of this supposed retirement, they were still planning 28 more
shuttle flights until recently, so Bush's date isn't even credible.
And third, even though the retirement date isn't politically credible,
the date is close to a truism of engineering. In other words, Bush
"limited" the shuttle to about when it will fall apart anyway.

Or, as I should say in all of this, Bush and O'Keefe. Frank
Seitzen reported in November that O'Keefe was promoting the then-fetal
space policy to the White House. I believe it.

>I think that there's an implicit "we can't go on to Moon/Mars
>until we have shown that we can actually finish this Station
>project" in a lot of what O'Keefe and Bush have done.

And, you know, you can't climb Mount McKinley until you have
shown that you can smoke 10 more cartons of cigarettes. 

-- 
  /\  Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
 /  \ Home page: http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~greg/
 \  / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
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Relevant Pages

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