Date: Thu, 22 Oct 92 05:03:57    
From: Space Digest maintainer <digests@isu.isunet.edu>
Reply-To: Space-request@isu.isunet.edu
Subject: Space Digest V15 #334
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Space Digest                Thu, 22 Oct 92       Volume 15 : Issue 334

Today's Topics:
                         NASA Shake Up Rumor?
                     Space for White People only?
TheSouth rose (was Re: Weather satellites & preventing property damage)

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Date: 21 Oct 92 18:02:16 GMT
From: David Fuzzy Wells <wdwells@nyx.cs.du.edu>
Subject: NASA Shake Up Rumor?
Newsgroups: sci.space

Add this to the rumor mill.  With Goldin getting rid of top Truly people and
sending them over to Freedom, and with Goldin's opinion of Freedom fairly
well known (at least at the high levels), our beloved Space Station can
start counting its days to the end.  The fact that he is "firing" these
guys and moving them over to an area that he doesn't particularly cares
for sends a big message to me and my associates that Freedom is toast.

		Fuzzy

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1992 17:17:09 GMT
From: Ken Arromdee <arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu>
Subject: Space for White People only?
Newsgroups: talk.politics.space,sci.space

In article <21OCT199210482540@tm0006.lerc.nasa.gov> pas4427@tm0006.lerc.nasa.gov (Philip A. Stehno) writes:
>>Another, less tangible,
>>but no less real, spinoff is the ability to look upon our Planet
>>as it actually is:  A small fragle ball which is unique in our
>>Solar System in supporting large quanties of water and life.  
>	The collage of pictures from the departing Voyager probes showed it 
>best, I think, when earth was shown to be a barely distinguishable blue ball 
>from far out in space.

Personally, I've always been annoyed when Earth pictures are used this way.

The Earth is, in some sense, fragile.  But its "fragile appearance" in pictures
is unrelated; that has more to do with innate human reactions towards relative
sizes of different parts of the picture than it has to do with characteristics,
such as complexity of the ecosystem, that indicate true fragility.  Promoting
from-space pictures of the Earth as showing fragility promotes the idea of
judging things by emotional reactions to their appearances, an idea whose
results in other areas may be less than benign.  (I'm sure you can come up with
examples yourself.)
--
"the bogosity in a field equals the bogosity imported from related areas, plus
the bogosity generated internally, minus the bogosity expelled or otherwise
disposed of."  -- K. Eric Drexler

Ken Arromdee (UUCP: ....!jhunix!arromdee; BITNET: arromdee@jhuvm;
     INTERNET: arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu)

------------------------------

Date: 21 Oct 92 18:58:24 GMT
From: "Kieran A. Carroll" <kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: TheSouth rose (was Re: Weather satellites & preventing property damage)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <1992Oct20.234248.1@fnalo.fnal.gov> higgins@fnalo.fnal.gov (Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey) writes:
>
... Southerners put us on the Moon.  I don't think
>Yankees could have done it in eight years. 
>
Bill, make that ``Southerners >and Canadians<'' ---
a largish contingent of mid-level engineers who were laid
off when Avro's Arrow project was shut down migrated to
NASA, and formed a large fraction of the people who
planned and managed the Apollo program. Although, to be
quite honest about it, a lot of those engineers were Brits
(who moved to Canada when Britain started dismantling
>their< aviation industrial infrastructure). And let's not
forget the Germans (although they lived in Alabama, and
so I guess were also Southerners by then :-)
-- 

     Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute
     uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu

------------------------------

End of Space Digest Volume 15 : Issue 334
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