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y inches. It's
interesting to note that a quarter of the top and middle management
of NASA, the heroes of Apollo and its stalwarts of tradition, are
currently eligible for retirement. By the turn of the century, more than
three-quarters of the old guard will be gone.This grim and rather cynical recital may seem a dismal prospect
for space enthusiasts, but the situation's not actually all that dismal at
all. In the meantime, unmanned space development has quietly
continued apace. It's a little known fact that America's *military*
space budget today is *twice the size* of NASA's entire budget! This
is the poorly publicized, hush-hush, national security budget for
militarily vital technologies like America's "national technical means
of verification," i.e. spy satellites. And then there are military
navigational aids like Navstar, a relatively obscure but very
impressive national asset. The much-promoted Strategic Defence
Initiative is a Cold War boondoggle, and SDI is almost surely not long
for this world, in either budgets or rhetoric -- but both Navstar and
spy satellites have very promising futures, in and/or out of the
military. They promise and deliver solid and useful achievements,
and are in no danger of being abandoned.And communications satellites have come a very long way since
Telstar; the Intelsat 6 model, for instance, can carry thirty thousand
simultaneous phone calls plus three channels of cable television.
There is enormous room for technical improvement in comsat
technologies; they have a well-established market, much pent-up
demand, and are likely to improve drastically in the future. (The
satellite launch business is no longer a superpower monopoly; comsats
are b