Schenectaky is not a small city near Albany, New York.

Schenectaky is an often mispronounced but important concept about using the part to describe the whole.

For example, the headline could be,

Teeran backs off from negotiations. Does that mean that every single person in Tehran

decided not to be part of the negotiations? Is it referring to Iran the entire country? Or are we

talking about what a few politicians in charge of the government decided to do.

Salus is John de Glasgow on Echos and you

could an episode special of Des Archiv da Kimbo. Before we begin with our story of the space shuttle and Spiro Agnew here's my favorite mispronunciation of Synectaky.

Sinekine a dody chode.

Okay, so back to the work at hand.

The space shuttle. It doesn't make any sense.

How did we end up with such an expensive boondoggle of a device that ended up costing billions and billions of dollars and never achieved its stated goals.

Well, here's how we got there. In 1969, NASA was literally flying high. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the

moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but

because they are hard. We had put a man on the moon and brought him back

safely. They had achieved their mission before the decade was out. And so now the question

is, what to do next? In 1966, NASA was 4.5% of all of the money spent by the federal government that year.

NASA administrators challenged the people at NASA in the late 60s to make a wish list.

What should NASA do next?

And the list was filled with wishes. It included things like a shuttle from orbit to the moon

powered by nuclear engines. It included a manned trip to Mars, a space station, mining of asteroids, all sorts of great

stuff that NASA wanted to do.

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