Introductory Remarks Gerard K. O'Neill Space Studies Institute Thank you very much. Although I work on SSI matters that arc referred to me, most SSI work is done by Gregg Maryniak, Executive Vice President, and Bettie Greber, Barbara Faughnan, and Chris Faranetta of the SSI staff, assisted by a small number of volunteers. They arc the core of SSI. I'd like to express our collective appreciation for them at this time. As you know, SSI is a low profile operation. That's by design. We arc not a •Gee Whiz" society - we're trying to do serious, worthwhile, permanent thinp which arc going to be valuable and bring us out into space. In that tradition there was a quiet ceremony yesterday at the banquet. It may even have passed some of you by, but I'd like to alert you to it. One of the attendees at our conference is Mr. Shimizu, who travels frequently between Japan and the United States. He is of the family of the Shimizu Construction Company, one of the largest construction companies in the world. There was a modest appearance by Mr. Shimizu, giving what is probably the shortest speech on record, at last evening's banquet, as he handed me an envelope. I opened it a little later and out came cash for SSI in the amount of several thousand dollars. Thank you, Mr. Shimizu, on behalf of SSI, for your generosity. We look forward to working with you in the future as we have in the past. I'm going to take the liberty to cut in a bit to the time of the morning session, although I realize it's condensed already. Several people have asked the status of a commercial company, Gcostar, on which SSI had a dependence. I have been out of that company, with no chance to influence its management for five years. The bad news is that Gcostar has just failed. The potential good news is that several extremely high quality people have joined me in an attempt, based on a new idea that would reduce costs to a very low value, to start a new company providing true Gcostar service. Dr. Bernard Oliver, who was for 30 years the Director of Research at Hewlett Packard, winner of the National Medal of Science, member of many Presidential commissions, and for over twenty-five years a member of the Board of Directors of Hewlett Packard, has agreed to be on the Board of the new company. He, and other of that quality, make up our small but stellar Board. Another piece of potential good news is that at a cost to governmental agencies of some twenty million dollars, xv the hand-held transceiver development is about 80% complete. It is an Earth stat.ion with two-way communication to the satellites in geostationary orbit. That system can provide automatic positioning to about four or five meters with every transmission, using the method which I patented in 1982 It has already been demonstrated in the direction from the hand-held battery operated transceiver up to the satellite twcntyfive thousand miles away. So I'm not closing with a downer on that subject, but say rather that several of us arc intent on seeing the radio determination system in place, and in a short time; that is roughly twenty-four months. We feel that we have to do that at a very low cost. There are many ways in which the effort could fail, but we have the highest possible quality of people working on it. I'd like to comment now on the lecture of our dear friend and fine speaker of last night, Joe Allen, former astronaut, and about the Augustine Report which he spoke of. It bears on the general question of where NASA is going. First of all, Joe Allen, who served on the Augustine Commission, is a wonderful person. I said a fcw things about him last night, and won't repeat them, but be is one of the finest, most intelligent, and most capable individuals whom I've ever met, and is totally honest. He has been a dear friend for many years. He spoke in conservative terms last night, which was appropriate to his responsibility as a member of the Augustine Commission. But we also know that within him there beats the heart of someone who is quite willing to go out on a personal limb. Someone who would jump in his T38 and take off from Houston and fly up to McGuire in 1974 to attend a conference called by an unknown physics professor at Princeton on a subject not as semi-orthodox as space manufacturing, but purely, blatantly and simply, onehundred percent on space colonies. Now that shows where Joe's heart really is. During the period since the last SSI conference, Joe has joined the Board of Directors of the Space Studies Institute and is a responsible and conscientious Board member. Here is my personal view about the Augustine report, and about where I see NASA and the federal government going at the present time. Although I served on the President's Commission on Space in the mid 1980's, I, just as Joe did last night, will speak my own mind. The Augustine report, in my judgment, was
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