I normally don’t pay much heed to letters to the editor, but this one from a Mr. Weaver E. Gore, Jr., which appeared in Tuesday’s edition of the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, caught my eye:
I notice that the government is sending a probe to Pluto at a cost of $700 million (“Unmanned NASA craft blasts off on mission to Pluto,” Jan. 20). Divide that amount by $150,000 and one would be able to build 4,666 houses on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The only reason that I can see why NASA keeps squandering money is to support Boeing, Pratt and Whitney, General Electric and other people who contract with the government at inflated prices.
We have wasted two probes to Mars when the robots would not work. Is that proof there is no intelligent life on Earth?
President Bush is now asking for $150 billion to further put innocent people in danger and getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hmmmm… three paragraphs complaining about a $700-million Pluto mission (take that, advocates of robotic missions), and just one sentence tacked on to the end to complain about something that costs more than 200 times as much. But everyone’s got their own priorities.
Is it just me, or have letters to the editor in general gotten notably dumber in the past few years? My theory is that the people who used to write intelligent ones are mostly blogging these days.
And the guy is so uninformed that he apparently thinks the two Mars rovers don’t work!
He’s probably talking about Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander or possibly Beagle 2 (which was British).
Given all the letters to the editor I’ve seen lately, its clear that the public doesn’t have a clue whats going on. I think its high time we had a dedicated website that lists the benefits of space to the public. Call it “spacebenefits.com” or something like that. I’d break it out into three categories of benefits: direct (GPS/Direct TV), developed for space (e.g. medical equipment developed for space that was tweaked for use on the Earth), and indirect (the technology benefitted from money spent on space programs).
Some letters to the editor don’t warrant a response. Still there are those that people read and accept as gospel. If we had a website to point to, then people would accept spending money on space if they could see the benefits on the ground.
Actually the government did purchase well over 1,000 mobile homes for Katrina victims. They are parked unused in Arkansas because federal regulations forbid that kind of housing in most of the impacted area.
This is a great example of “another person’s pork. . . .” Astronomers attack human lunar and Mars missions because they are too expensive and useless, and others attack astronomers because their projects are too expensive and who cares about Pluto anyway? At the end of the line, we all just live in blissful ignorance in cheap-and-dirty caves.
— Donald