At 12:20 AM 12/12/96 -0500, kc4yer@amsat.org (Philip Chien) wrote: >Willie Koorts <wpk@saao.ac.za> asked for Andres Valencia <avalencia@true.net>: > >>According to Eric J. Chaisson in "The Hubble Wars"; HST was down to a >>356 miles orbit when serviced .."it had fallen some 25 miles in 43 month >>deployed at 380 miles > >take anything which Eric Chaisson says in his book with a grain of salt. One might also take all this with a conversion table handy: conversion deployed serviced fallen [meters] nm 1852 331 311 20 sm 1609 380 356 25 km 1000 608 498 40 >Eric was the head of education at the Space Telescope institute, and >not somebody who was within the NASA system, or understood how the NASA >system works. I am at a loss to comprehend just how one would meaningfully define "within the NASA system" -- particularly as a precondition for understanding "how the NASA system works." @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ John Pike Director, Space Policy Project Federation of American Scientists 307 Massachusetts Ave. NE Washington, DC 20002 V 202-675-1023, F 202-675-1024, http://www.fas.org/