KATZ@USC-ISIF@sri-unix (11/18/82)
From: Alan R. Katz <KATZ at USC-ISIF> High Frontier: Many objections I had to the original message about High Frontier have been already addressed. I have talked with Gen. Graham (sp?) a few times. He did NOT start out by being a space advocate regardless of speculations to the contrary. He did NOT originally think space was wonderful, his original motivation was to find a stratagy different from MAD, and asked: What areas are we ahead of the Russians in? He came up with space as the answer to a problem, then raised some money and hired some people to work out the technical details. Many of us start out with the premise that space is good, then find ways of justifying it, it is gratifying when someone looks for the solution to a problem, and comes up with space as the answer. Also, as has been mentioned, the purpose of the system is not to be able to defend totally against any and all ICBMs, but to defend against some of them. He orignally expected defense against only 10% of the missles, the fact that it turns out to be 70 to 90% makes it even better. More on this issue can be found in the High Frontier Study. (It is availible from High Frontier, I dont have the address handy, but can get it at home is someone wants it). ******************************************** Another point: This mailing list is an INTERNETWORK mailing list. That means there is more than ONE network worth of people reading it. In particular, this is NOT the net.space list only. There are many people on the Arpanet reading this and to us it is the SPACE mailing list. It has seemed to me for some time that many people in USENET are totally unaware that there are other people out here, and talk about do such and such to net.space or creating another spinoff list called net.foo. Also, a number of times it seems we in the arpanet get messages which are responses to other messages that we have never seen. Sorry for the flame (sort of) but this has been getting annoying for some time. Alan -------