Oil From Under Water

TOM ZOELLNER’S ARTICLE ON THE DE velopment of offshore drilling (“Oil and Water,” Fall 2000) brought back some exciting memories. In 1950 I was one of a small team of geologists working for Magnolia Petroleum out of Morgan City, Louisiana, and it was my good fortune to be present the day we discovered oil on our drill site 25 miles offshore. We ran a routine Schlumberger electric log, and it showed a thick sand unit that looked hydrocarbon-saturated. We then took a series of thumb-size sidewall cores of the sand, and when I ran them through the standard tests, they were all loaded with oil. I got on the two-way FM radio and called in the good news to Morgan City, and I could hear the cheering in the background. They relayed it on up the line, and I could imagine the joy in the boardroom. After several years of offshore work and many dry holes, the payback could begin.

John Brophy
Corvallis, Oreg.

Oil From Under Water

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED TO KNOW that the vessel used to drill the first well off Louisiana for Kerr-McGee is still in service, in another incarnation. It is now the pipe-laying barge Delta 1 , owned by Global Industries. And the floating platform known as Mr. Charlie is in use in Morgan City, Louisiana, as a museum and training facility.

John Robinson
via e-mail

Engineering Vs. Politics

I HAVE BEEN A DEVOTED READER OF Invention & Technology since the first issue, in 1985. Most of the articles have been very interesting and informative, but “Telstar,” in the Fall 2000 issue (by Robert Zimmerman), crossed the boundary between objective scientific reporting and political commentary. The article minimizes the successes of government programs while exaggerating private-sector successes. It makes a broad claim for the failure of the Communications Satellite Act despite admitting its accomplishments, and makes little mention of the development by NASA and its predecessors (using large amounts of public money) of the launch vehicles and related technologies that AT&T needed to implement Telstar . The three million dollars NASA charged for the rocket and associated services seems modest indeed, and the “extremely high cost” in patent rights that the article claims the government charged AT&T came in an era when the company, with a virtual monopoly in telecommunications, had little to fear from potential competitors. Furthermore, as the article admits, AT&T later reaped “a huge profit” from the sale of its Comsat stock.

Contrary to the article, it is not clear, to me at least, that “the outlook for private space-based commerce is bright” now, with public support having gradually declined. Corporations have had a very hard time developing viable launch vehicles and usually use governmental ones, from countries such as the United States, France, China, and Russia. Supposed commercial applications for the manufacturing of materials such as crystals and biochemicals in space have been slow to emerge. And the Iridium system, conceived and executed by the private sector, was a commercial failure though an apparent technical success.

The argument in favor of purely private enterprise and free-market competition in space is questionable at best. On the contrary, Telstar and subsequent space-based communications systems appear to demonstrate the superiority of co-operative publicprivate collaborations.

Larry J. Eriksson
Madison, Wis.