----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary McMurtry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 11:12 AM
Subject: Re: More jolly Space Station news
>
> Well, at the risk of being considered a "bottom line" man, here's my
> read on the space station fiasco. In the early 1970s, Nixon wanted
> the space shuttle because they thought it would be a great way to
> launch err, spy satellites. So, we got it. Now, we have the space
> station to give the shuttles someplace to go when they're not
> launching satellites, fixing telescopes, bore-bore-bore, etc. The
> science is marginal at best, contrived at worst. This would be a
> great area for congress and NASA to cut costs. It's an expensive
> albatross, if there ever was one.
Ah, but it's also a major supply of pork -- which is the other reason that
Congress is reluctant to kill it. And it wasn't a "mistake" on NASA's
part -- like the Shuttle, it is a deliberate, multibillion-dollar criminal
fraud and always has been. The sole purpose of both projects has always
really been to retain NASA's bloated funding levels after the end of Apollo,
and NASA got them through with the classic Camel's Nose technique: persuade
Congress and the White House to fund the things in the first place by
ridiculously understating their cost and overstating their effectiveness,
and then each year incrementally raise one and lower the other while arguing
that if Congress doesn't continue funding the project anyway, the money
already spent will have been wasted. (Science journalist Daniel S.
Greenberg calls it "the sucker-bait technique".) As one retired NASA
official told a Time magazine reporter after the Challenger disaster: "We
hated to do it, but we were getting SO many votes."
This also explains why NASA has repeatedly, openly and illegally defied the
Freedom of Information Act to withhold documents written by high-ranking
NASA officials on this subject -- and, as "Nature" has pointed out, many of
the documents that have been released confirm that NASA officials up to and
including James Fletcher deliberately planned the strategy. But -- as the
savings and loan disaster also proves -- criminal activities will pay off
big time, and you will never be punished for them, if you can persuade a
majority of members of the legislature itself to support them.
==
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