Word: oversold
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...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...
Baseball these days, as all agree, is the national pursetime: overpaid and oversold, merchandising brief bursts of tedium between flurries of beer commercials. Ah, but when the world was young, thinks the old child, the former boy, it was all wonderful. I remember...
...after Apollo, something went wrong with the nation's space program. Despite successes -- such as the Skylab space station and the series of unmanned missions that will reach its climax next month when Voyager 2 arrives at Neptune -- the program seemed to founder. The space shuttle, for example, was oversold as the one answer to U.S. space-transportation needs. But it is too big to put astronauts in space efficiently, too small to launch the largest payloads and too unreliable to live up to the 60-flight-per-year schedule once promised. The result, even before the Challenger accident...
...control still faces daunting practical and philosophical objections. Even some advocates think it is oversold. Police officers tend to equate guns with drugs; so long as the crack trade is not significantly reduced, they think, the inner-city shoot-outs will rage on and contribute to the impression (not entirely justified in light of slight overall declines in the national crime rate) of a rising tide of violent crime that has driven so many peaceful citizens to arm themselves. On the practical side, writing a definition of paramilitary weapons that would distinguish them from some types of semiautomatic hunting rifles...
...concluded that in Washington on all these decisions we deal with, it's never as bad as the critics say it's going to be. And never as good as the advocates expect. I agonized when the Bridgeton hit a mine in the Persian Gulf. Had I oversold our capabilities? I was in a blue funk. The Vincennes Airbus shootdown was painful for me. I had lived in fear of such a mistake. But once it occurs, I believe you have no choice but to face up to it -- publicly -- well aware that you'll be criticized no matter what...