David Ellis
U.S. aerospace planners call it “brochuremanship,” the tendency of contractors to make wild claims about the effectiveness of proposed weapons systems. Now this liar’s art has spread beyond Washington. A journalist back from the U.S.S.R. tells of Soviet military technicians who pitched a costly radar missile-tracking system to the Kremlin. On April 28, when the U.S. was scheduled to launch a space shuttle, the technicians triumphantly declared that the lift-off had been detected and tracked. Several hours later, NASA announced that the takeoff had been postponed.
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