Word: shelffuls
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...took over NASA in 1992, he knew that in deficit-conscious times, this kind of trust-fund spending could not continue. From now on, he decreed, the luxury ships of the past would be scrapped. In their place would be stripped-down spacecraft built essentially from available, off-the-shelf parts. What's more, the new ships would not contain a whole science lab's worth of instruments and experiments, but just a handful--generally the ones the scientists deemed absolutely essential to make the trip worthwhile...
...design philosophy? Compare this week's Pathfinder mission with the two Viking missions 21 years ago. Conceived in the heady era of big-budget NASA programs, the Vikings cost nearly $3 billion (measured in 1997 dollars) and were as ambitious and customized as Pathfinder is spare and off the shelf. NASA's old principle of superredundancy is reflected in the fact that there was not one but two Viking spacecraft, the second an exact replica of the first...
That, at least, is the way NASA planners hope things will go; so far it looks as if they'll get their wish. The ships that will be used for these ambitious missions are remarkably cheap ones, hammered together from available, off-the-shelf parts. While this makes for less elegant vehicles, it also makes for less pricey ones. They cost no more than $250 million, in contrast to the $1.48 billion it costs to build luxury liners like the still-to-be-launched Cassini Saturn probe. Cheap ships means more of them, and for space planners that...
Inside stores, Coke and Pepsi slug it out as much as anywhere, and you can't buy a soft drink unaffiliated with one of the two. Kellogg's cereals vie for space with Dannon yogurt products. In drug stores, Old Spice, Gillette and Secret occupy the deodorant shelf. Wrangler and Lee jeans, meanwhile, hang in the windows of clothing sellers...
...hang up the phone and grab my portable alarm clock off the adjacent shelf. It's 9:13 a.m. I drop the clock to the floor, roll over and go back to sleep...