No Subject

rmenich@... wrote: It seems that Mars is sexy, whereas the Moon is passe' and NEAs just don't
seem to have crowd appeal (despite the magnificently successful NEAR
Shoemaker mission). Sexy seems to get the money. I was at a SIGGRAPH conference several years ago and there was a lot discussion about how women view the world compared with the way men view it and how this figured into video games and other computer generated media. Women see the world in terms of relationships. So if you asked almost any woman who had attempted to play Myst (which was big at the time) if they had finished the game the answer was no and the reason was because there was nobody to talk to.
There was also interesting discussions about maps and Cartesian coordinates. Next time you watch a women read a map notice that she turns the map so that direction she is going is the same direction that the map is pointed whereas if you observe a male the map will stay with north to the top and he will mentally make the coordinate transforms to know which direction he is headed on the map.
Anyway, NASA has for many years known that when it talks about missions that have PEOPLE in them that at least half the the voters are much more interested and that when it comes to collecting data via dumb space probes that there is much less interest from the general public. Mars is a similar thing. The possibility, no matter how far fetched, that there could be somebody else to talk to. Then you added in people going to Mars and at least half the voter population is now capable of paying some attention, when not out shopping.
Now since NASA is in the business of keeping NASA in business, those missions that can generate greater public interest get the lions share of the budget. Sex is part of the equation. Sexy is not.
Mitchell James
http://www.InnerTransit.org>
mejames@...