REM%MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP (01/06/84)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC> Although the start of your message is missing, so your message starts in the middle of a word: "hronous orbits, for example.", your point about ion rockets damaging the upper atmosphere is well taken. We should proceed with designing and building ion rockets, but be ware that as with all other things we do there's a limit to how much we can do of one thing before we start polluting the ecology too much. We must therefore be willing to limit the total use of ion rockets or any other technology when the side-effects become significant in negative ways. (We should have curtailed use of coal and petroleum many years ago, before Canada started suffering acid rain from our burning of coal and before Los Angeles started having smog alerts.) But if the exhaust from commercial jetliners isn't destroying our atmosphere yet, even though each of about a hundred major airports has a hundred or so takeoffs per day, I suspect we can put a lot of ionliners up in space before the ozone layer is damaged significantly.