My first letter to the editor
Jun. 22nd, 2004 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalDear NPR,
I listened with increasing annoyance and frustration to the commentary by the NASA historian concerning yesterday's historic lanuch of SpaceShip One into suborbit. To hear him speak, the achievement was little more than an expensive publicity stunt, rather than a remarkable engineering accomplishment. And I am underwhelmed by his contention that NASA is the only agency capable of propelling people into orbit. The past forty years of history have only proven that NASA has a remarkable track record at taking the most expensive and hazardous path into space, as proven by their blind reliance on the Space Shuttle, despite it's numerous faults and it's non-existent profitability. At 1/2 billion dollars per Shuttle launch, there is little comparison to Spaceship One's estimated fee of some $80,000 to replace it's much safer rocket engine.
With his blithe dismissal of the flights of the human-powered Gossamer Albatross, and the Voyager, your historian also ignores that the Albatross led to the first solar powered aircraft, which consequently has led to current testing of unmanned solar powered aircraft which may be used for unmanned survelliance aircraft, not to mention all the experimentation into long-duration unmanned flight that Voyager contributed to.
To follow the historian's logic, Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic did nothing to prove the viability of flight long range trans-oceanic flight, and in the 1930's we should obviously have placed our hopes on a nationally run airline which if we're lucky might have transported some 30 or so people a year, at an expense of only ten or twenty billion dollars of taxpayer money.
Yours,
Royce Easton Day, Columbia, MD
I listened with increasing annoyance and frustration to the commentary by the NASA historian concerning yesterday's historic lanuch of SpaceShip One into suborbit. To hear him speak, the achievement was little more than an expensive publicity stunt, rather than a remarkable engineering accomplishment. And I am underwhelmed by his contention that NASA is the only agency capable of propelling people into orbit. The past forty years of history have only proven that NASA has a remarkable track record at taking the most expensive and hazardous path into space, as proven by their blind reliance on the Space Shuttle, despite it's numerous faults and it's non-existent profitability. At 1/2 billion dollars per Shuttle launch, there is little comparison to Spaceship One's estimated fee of some $80,000 to replace it's much safer rocket engine.
With his blithe dismissal of the flights of the human-powered Gossamer Albatross, and the Voyager, your historian also ignores that the Albatross led to the first solar powered aircraft, which consequently has led to current testing of unmanned solar powered aircraft which may be used for unmanned survelliance aircraft, not to mention all the experimentation into long-duration unmanned flight that Voyager contributed to.
To follow the historian's logic, Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic did nothing to prove the viability of flight long range trans-oceanic flight, and in the 1930's we should obviously have placed our hopes on a nationally run airline which if we're lucky might have transported some 30 or so people a year, at an expense of only ten or twenty billion dollars of taxpayer money.
Yours,
Royce Easton Day, Columbia, MD
