Space tourism, and the unspoken US victory in space

No. It was a military funded project. The Universities did much of the
work under grants from DOD.

On Wednesday, June 5, 2002, at 08:34 AM, panamabob wrote:

> If memory serves it was a university thing that the military
> 'discovered" as
> a way of having a redunatnt communication system.

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect and
deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html