While the "securing" of the launch time is debatable and probably not really worth while, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Those saying that it is foolish to do this are not, as far as I'm aware, knowledgeable of terrorist tactics. It seems easy enough to keep ones mouth/keyboard quiet. Perhaps we can make a contest of it and submit times of launch about 25 hours in advance and see who's the closest when they are announced an hour later. One could make a case that the reason for the launch uncertainty is to prevent a hijacked aircraft from flying into the shuttle right at launch. To accomplish this, the launch time needs to be known sometime in the future to be able to know which aircraft to hijack so that it's not flying for hours waiting for a launch to occur. While hitting a shuttle on the ground would be a major event, hitting a shuttle right at launch would be much greater, since television coverage would be plentiful. While there may be those terrorists capable of calculating the launch time themselves, it is not a forgone conclusion and I do not wish to help them out. I heard one report that they had a copy of an atomic bomb plan that they thought was real but was from a parody web site. Bill Bard ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 20 2002 - 08:38:04 EST