Strategic Defense Initiative funding

President Bush is increasing the funding for SDI in the current budget
cycle, and I wonder why I was expelled from graduate school at the
University of Texas at Austin recently, when my research was on the
same ballistic targeting problem they have been having so much trouble
with for the missile defense system. I had passed all the courses for
a Ph.D in orbital mechanics, passed my written qualifying exams, and
had completed most of my research. I was a semester away from getting
my doctorate, and they expelled me ~ with malice, I dare say.

UT Austin's Aerospace Engineering Department is one of the major space
research groups, especially with the Center for Space Research on
campus. You would think they would be very intrested in my research,
which also had applications for the Mars missions. (Actually, it was
an optimization of the Earth to Mars trajectory, which fundamentally
is the same as the Earth based missile trajectory problem, all you do
is change a couple of constants in the code.)

It really makes me wonder if this SDI funding will have the same
outcome as President Reagan's "Star Wars" project that spent $1
trillion and accomplished absolutely nothing.

You can find details on my research on my web page at the publications
link.

Bill Clark
http://home.austin.rr.com/whcii/

"Bill Clark" wrote in message
m...

It really makes me wonder if this SDI funding will have the same
outcome as President Reagan's "Star Wars" project that spent $1
trillion and accomplished absolutely nothing.


I am sorry but it accomplished something:

It accomplished 1 trillon bucks benefits for the
people that received money for nothing :-)

"jacob navia" wrote in message
...

"Bill Clark" wrote in message
m...

It really makes me wonder if this SDI funding will have the same
outcome as President Reagan's "Star Wars" project that spent $1
trillion and accomplished absolutely nothing.


I am sorry but it accomplished something:

It accomplished 1 trillon bucks benefits for the
people that received money for nothing :-)

I would like to see some documentation for the $1 trillion figure. I have
benefitted from the program--AND I think it's unworkable with foreseeable
technology. However, it's actually had some useful technological spinoffs.

Mark Folsom

jacob navia wrote:

I am sorry but it accomplished something:

It accomplished 1 trillon bucks benefits for the
people that received money for nothing :-)

Hey, *I* am one of those people (though my share was
WAY short of a trill). I think to say that they
got nothing for the money is very wrong. Hey, I've
worked on LOTS of gummint projects that were MUCH
larger wastes of money than SDI! As far as I know most
of the work was more or less basic research rather
than developing some defense system. So hopefully
one day some of that data will come out through
freedom of information. Now that has to be better
than say the giant missle systems they built and
then signed a treaty and abandoned. I worked on that
too and it was sort like I dug a hole and then
boss man told me I went and put that hole in the
wrong place and had to move it! I guess we just had
a failure to communicate.

bjacoby
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