From: Frederick.A.Ringwald@dartmouth.edu (Frederick A. Ringwald)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: SPS feasibility and other space development
Date: 18 Aug 92 13:02:45 GMT
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH


Listen, Dennis, a scientist's job is ask questions: and the harder they
are, and the more skeptical they are, the better they are. That's how
you get important results!

I am doing my job. What are you doing?

Uncritical acceptance of ideas, no matter how appealing they might
seem, is harmful to any field. Space is no exception. People will hold 
you to promises you make, and will hold it against you if you tell 
them things that aren't right. Undisciplined grand speculation isn't 
even good science fiction. At best, boosterism (good pun intended) is 
misleading; at worst, it makes you look kooky. Believe me, kooky is 
NOT an image you want to project when writing a research proposal, 
especially not when you get to the budget section!

If you can't provide me with even approximate literature references,
better than newspaper articles, especially when I repeatedly request
them, I wonder how much you read this stuff, or even whether the 
references exist at all. I suppose I'll have to go back to doing my 
own homework, and so much for the net as a research tool. Never mind 
numbers accurate to the nth digit; I'd welcome numbers *reliable* to 
the first digit. Also, I always get very suspicious about anything 
I'm not allowed to ask questions about!

What is it about this field that so often elicits a quasi-religious
response? My fondest dream that still hasn't come true is to find some 
way to fly to the stars and be back by Monday morning. But there are 
good reasons to believe this might not be so easy (cf. Taylor and 
Wheeler, Spacetime Physics; Misner, Thorne, & Wheeler, Gravitation, 
although watch this book, it has lots of errors, and you really should 
work everything out yourself). Until I have some even better reasons 
to believe this might be feasible after all, I'll keep busy with 
practical, mundane, unimaginative things such as outbursts around 
neutron stars, bending waves in accretion disks, and stars erupting 
before my very eyes (or instruments). I've certainly had enough of
THIS!

P.S. There's a preprint running around by Richard Gott (that may or 
may not yet have come out in Physical Review D) that actually takes 
faster-than-light travel seriously, basically as a consequence of what 
two superstrings passing each other do to spacetime. Hawking, Thorne, 
and others are trying their hardest to find something wrong with it, 
as it severely strains the notion of causality...

P.P.S. Your new postings about reviving the Saturn are *much* more like
it. Not only is this of potential long-term interest, but there's
nothing like the immediate applicability of the rumble of a rocket
engine. With all the excitement lately, I'm almost scared to ask
another question, but ask I will: what are the F1A engines for? Why
revive the Saturn class? It makes no sense to develop capability for no
reason; the taxpayers won't like it. So, what are the reasons? More
interestingly, what are the payloads? SSF parts? Large comsats? Lunar
or planetary spacecraft?