While you seem to only remember the failures, have you noticed the great
successes that NASA has achieved.  Limiting myself only to recent times
(i.e., we won't get into the spectacular success of Apollo), did you happen
to notice that the Cassini spacecraft went into orbit around Saturn and is
returning wonderful data?  There are 2 Mars Exploration Rovers still
operating on the surface of Mars which have outlived their original mission
requirements by about a factor of 3 in time now and traveled about 5 times
farther than their design specifications.  We have a spacecraft orbiting Mars
returning the most spectacular orbital images ever seen of any planetary
surface other than Earth.  Speaking of which, did you see those wonderful
images of Hurricane Frances taken from Earth orbit?  While we are still down
after the Columbia accident, did you notice that there were about 111
successful shuttle flights (about 85 consecutive successful flights since
Challenger) with only 2 failures?  Did you see that we just launched a
spacecraft to Mercury which is operating normally on its way there?  How
about the recently completed Galileo mission to Jupiter?  We've learned more
about the geology of the moons of Jupiter than we knew about all the moons of
the solar system combined before that mission.  How about HST?  It's been
re-writing our knowledge of Astronomy as it continues to return top notch
data on all types of objects in the Universe.  An infrared telescope called
the Spitzer Space Telescope was recently sent into space and has been
returning some excellent data.  The Stardust spacecraft recently flew past a
comet, returning unprecidented images of such a primitive object.  The NEAR
spacecraft orbited asteroid Eros and completed its mission by soft landing on
its surface.  While one mars lander failed about 5 years ago, 5 out of 6 Mars
landers that NASA has sent to the red planet have succeded in landing there
and completing their missions.

Most companies would dream of successes like NASAs, particularly considering
how dangerous and risky spaceflight is.  While spacecraft may fail sometimes,
they often have already returned significant useful data and while Genesis
crashed, the ingenious scientists and engineers on the mission will not only
figure out why its parachutes did not deploy, but they are likely to actually
get science out of the bits and pieces - perhaps not all the science, but at
least some of what they were looking forward to.  To claim that NASA is a
joke is rediculous and short sighted.

Jim.

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, TEAM 360 wrote:

> Unbelievable..what a joke NASA is...if they were a private corporation,
> they would have gone bankrupt a long time ago! What a waste of money,
> huh? At least the crash pictures looked cool... I guess they should have
> consulted Team Evilfish on how to make the chute pop....
> 
> 		
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Jim Scotti
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/