Word: logsdon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...except for what one Congresswoman described recently as an empty garage. Forty billion dollars is too much for a space station that does nothing -- not when there are real adventures and real science on which to spend the money. Commenting on the brave new do-nothing space station, John Logsdon, a space policy analyst at George Washington University, said that canceling the space station would be an admission that NASA has wasted billions of dollars and years of planning. It would, he explained, destroy the credibility of the space program. Of course, exactly the opposite is true. NASA has wasted...
...base on the moon in preparation for sending astronauts to Mars, Nixon issued a statement that shook the NASA hierarchy: "Space must take its place with other national priorities." Suddenly the space agency's primary mission became sheer survival. "Once NASA's goals in space were rejected," says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, "its purpose became maintenance of the institution. A siege mentality developed. NASA circled the wagons and began to lie to itself and everybody else...
...January 1972 Nixon authorized the development of the shuttle, a decision that Logsdon calls "one of the major public policy mistakes of the last quarter-century." As the naysayers predicted at the time, the shuttle was highly oversold. While a remarkable feat of engineering, it was highly complex and subject to recurring glitches that have prevented NASA from ever achieving more than nine launches -- never mind 60 -- a year. Worse, since it depended almost solely on the shuttle to orbit satellites until after the Challenger disaster, the U.S. has fallen behind in the development of expendable rocket launchers. More...
...mainly to focus attention on the limits of high technology. The immediate result is that for all Hubble's tremendous cost, two of its most heralded advantages -- the ability to distinguish very close objects and the knack for detecting faint light from the early universe -- are lost. Said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University: "It's horrible...