In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
astronomyguyty wrote:

Hey well it's just me again! I found out that I get the NASA channel on
direct tv! I 'm so HAPPY. IT's channel 376 for you that care. I didn't
know I got it so I was worried I wouldn't get to see the new launches
but I DO! SO COOL! Thanks for looking at my post. SORRY NO one posted
back! Alright going to drive my parents abusloutly nuts & watch the
NASA channel in the living room. Talk to you all later. LATER DAYS!



Oh, yes- the NASA channel...home of those great early 1960's
documentaries about man's future in space with the primitive B&W
animation and the ethereal music to go with them.
Hit the Way-Back machine, Mr. Peabody....
"This is Saturn V...there are many questions to be answered before we
can build Saturn V.
Can a program that's going to peak out at around three to four percent
of the entire national budget be justified by the promise that it might
fetch back several hundreds of pounds of rocks from the Moon?

We should have kept using Saturn V; it is still one of the
best launch vehicles made. And it is not the pile of rocks
brought back from the moon, but what we have learned from
them, which matters. We would have learned much more if
we had not canceled the last few Apollo trips, and we would
have done well to start a lunar base which could provide us
with still more knowledge. Using the money instead to get
people on welfare to have larger families, in an already
overpopulated world, which is what we have been doing, is
far worse.

Can a former member of the Nazi rocket building program be successfully
sold to America as our new hero...despite his former involvement in a
slave labor camp and the death of thousand of slave laborers in it?

How much was he responsible for? There is no evidence that
he recruited or mistreated the workers. That is not the
way to get things done.

As for his ability, he fairly quickly got an American object
in orbit after Eisenhower's stupid Vanguard attempts kept
failing, using off the shelf military rockets not intended
for the purpose.

Can President Kennedy successfully move Eisenhower's military-industrial
complex into equally profitable peaceful ends?

The military-industrial complex was a figment of a stupid
general's imagination.

These are the questions we must ask ourselves before we build Saturn V...."
Been there, saw that.

The move to "peaceful" research after the end of the Cold
War has almost destroyed basic research in the US. The
military found that basic researchers could do applied
work with the hidebound applied researchers could not do;
they had to thing "outside the box" to be theorists.
This continued during the Cold War because of the fear of
this being successful on the other side.

Meanwhile, the government support of research has destroyed
the universities' basis for their support, and it is in very
bad shape.

Do not think, however, that I want government investment in
space. I want to allow those who believe in man's development
in space to be able to support it instead of supporting the
ill-designed welfare programs, and to do it without government
interference. The same holds in education.

George Bernard Shaw wrote (from memory):

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt
the world to himself. Therefore, all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.




--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558