bukys (11/30/82)
It's OK with me if Hollywood or GM or whoever is allowed to use the shuttle or space station for "trivial" purposes, as long as they do not displace any "serious" users, and as long as they pay through the nose (meaning real cost + good share of development cost). I do not agree that the government has any duty to allow such use at any price less than that. In other words, Lucasfilm-imitators deserve no government subsidies for cute zero-g film techniques. Just think, if the government held fewer purse strings people would have less excuse for complaining about those purse strings being jerked around. Further discussions of the revolutionary idea of "limited government" should take place in "net.politics" PLEASE. Liudvikas Bukys ...!seismo!rochester!bukys
REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix (12/01/82)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC> I think I agree with you. Although perhaps NASA should fund some getaway special where a small explosion in zero-gee vacuum is filmed to give us the basic idea how much different those special effects will be from ones filmed on Earth, movie studies should pay their own way when making special-effects for movies en masse in space. But NASA should permit that kind of use before they permit random people just wasting shuttle time for a vacation flight that won't return even a bunch of exposed movie film.