eugene@statvax.UUCP (Eugene miya) (01/31/84)
My first attempt at posting news failed, I hope this makes it as Al Globius has succeeded. I am not a know it all about the space program, but I have worked at four NASA centers and at HQ over seven years now. And I am getting a bit weary. I started as a fresh out, anyway. Regarding the "Rights of Planets:" I suggest you find an opinion by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas entitled: "The Rights of Rocks." This was a conservation opinion expressed as Douglas was a big muckee-muck with the Sierra Club. Yes, planets have rights, including the earth. Look to Antarctica to legal precedent. We must proceed with care in our voyages into space. Carl Sagan and the Planetary Society would back me up on this (Please with care, especially if youcan't keep you own planet clean). Space stations were circular, probably, because they rotated to create "artificial gravity." Current space station design is probably based on getting something into orbit for as little cost as possible (launch cost). NASA's conservativism -- Yes, its very conservative, more than I like, but I worked on a $90M project which died 1/3 into its' life mission due to hardware problems (not uncommon). We underwent a Congressional investigation. Space is not as popular as people use to believe. At a Compcon(82), a speaker, not me, just happen to ask the audience for a show of hands, "How many people would like the US to have a Halley/ Tempel 2 comet mission?" Only 1/3 of the people raised their hand. Fiancing space is not cheap: note nuclear reactor funding. Civil servants don't make much. Contractors have limited say in policy. I worked indirectly (imaging simulation[re: graphics, etc.]) on Voyager and other at JPL. I saw nine proposals for deep-space missions get flushed down the tubes with one remaining when Reagan came into office. As far as I am concern, with Voyager and Pioneer, we are already in the business of interstellar space travel. Sending genes in space and colonizing Io have been discussed at lunch talks in NASA. (Free format discussions, neat things, too.) [Aside, while doing undergrad work, I worked for a company making disk drive heads, and we discussed what it would take to encode DNA for data storage --UV radiation would be a big problem]. Space is a pretty harsh environment: Voyager I suffered heavy radiation damage passing near Io. Computer chips have to be of low density, this reduces available memory, etc.. [Can't run UNIX in space yet.] It appears my first message on blasting astroids didn't get thru. If you are still interested in actually working in the space program, I will gladly act at intermediate, NASA needs computer science people. More details later, I have to log off. --eugene n miya MS 233-14 NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA 94035 emiya@ames-vmsb ucbvax!menlo70!ames-lm!eugene