text: The author went off topic throughout the article. The different information created slight confusion as to what the message he was trying to convey. The author stated that NASA is working on an approach to studying Venus that involves mechanical computers. He then said, "The thought of computers existing in those days may sound shocking, but these devices make calculations by using gears and levers..." It is irrelevant to the message when the mechanical computers were envisioned or the fact that it is shocking to hear that computers existed in 1940. It was hard to understand why computers were important to the article at all. The author made it difficult to focus on the message when he was stating random facts that were not important to the idea he was trying to support.