written by a fme set of people, including good friends of ours. For example, Dr. Thomas Paine, a member of that commission, is a Director of SSI. He was also the Chairman of the President's Commission on Space which I referred to. Laurel Wilkening, a capable and responsible person, was the second in command on the Nationa: Commission on Space. When the rubber met the road, as it always does in commission reports like that, and settled down to who were going to be the three or four people to write the final report, it was Laure~ Tom and I who met in Tucson, Arizona for several days to complete the report. That does not mean that those were the only people who contributed to it. There were extremely important contributions, especially from the bead of the Harvard Ast.ropbysical Conservatory, George Field, who was for health reasons unable to be with us in Tucson. I have not asked Joe Allen, but I'm virtually certain that Joe was one of the three or four, out of the dozen or so members of the Augustine Commission, who carried that same burden. If you read that fortyeight page report, which I recommend that you do, you will fmd it, I think, one of the most beautifully written documents that has ever come out of the federal government. Many of the things which it recommends, virtually everything that is said, makes a great deal of sense. Nevertheless, it is my belief that the Augustine report, like every other report which has been generated concerning the future of space, including the 1986 report of our National Commission on Space, are al~ in my judgment, too timid. They link fundamentally and make dependent the future of the United States space program on a science program. I say that speaking as a scientist. There is nothing more self-serving, there is nothing more conservative, than the scientific establishment. The scientific establishment takes as a high priority the justification of more science, more grants, more funds, more graduate students, and so on, doing basically the same things. We have seen that perpetuated for forty years of hydrogen fusion research without a positive economic .result. To be fair, some of NASA's worst blunders, the Shuttle and the Space Station, have nothing to do with science. I think we are seeing a fossilization that has occurred in NASA for many years. As long as NASA always looks to the scientific community to justify NASA's existence, we will always have a very timid though possibly still expensive, space program. It will not tie in with the needs of the ordinary person in this country. I have had an opportunity to observe alternative viewpoints because of some quite unusual changes that have happened in the federal government over the last couple of years since the election of President Bush. Because of work by Gregg and the SSI staff, I met personally with xvi the Vice President and with Dick Darman the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who is, by the way, very much a space buff. It was in a small group, over several hours. I made the point both to the Vice President and to Dick Darman that there is just one thing that will revitalize the space program, which as Joe says will otherwise become increasingly anachronistic and not a part of the ongoing vital life of the nation. That one thing that can drive a space program to become an essential part of our national life is real, genuine, economic benefit in large quantities brought to the people. Taking cases listed in the Augustine Report, I think that scientific exploration, including the socalled •Mission to Planet Earth• does not constitute such justification. The •Mission to Planet Earth,• is a fundamentally passive observational mission. It will simply be overtaken by events. The French Spot Image Spacecraft is already doing a far better job than the long, laborious, expensive U.S. governmental Landsat program bas ever done. Landsat fell into all sorts of political difficulties, whereas in France, Spot Image was handled intelligently. That's only one of many examples. I think that what's going to go on in the U. S. space program is a succession of pointless, duplicative programs. The productive alternative is to bring in ideas like solar power satellites. The best reason for people to be in space is not just because it's hot stuff, but because they're needed to do genuinely economically important tasks. And I made it clear in my discussions with the Vice President, Dick Darman, and others that I see satellite solar power, in whatever variant turns out to be the most cost-effective, to be the big driver; energy is the one unvarying thing that we know is going to be needed throughout the world even fifty years from now. We know from United Nations projections, which have always been on the conservative side, how much energy at a minimum is going to be needed - and it is one heck of a lot. Presently, NASA alone gets about fifteen billion dollars per year, manna from heaven. That's the standard way (a congressional appropriation) that money comes to a Federal agency: as a pure drain on the taxpayers. Unfortunately, NASA really is doing almost nothing concrete for the economic well-being of this country and for the environment of the world. It is hard to find exceptions to that statement. Let's contrast that fifteen billion dollar program with the economic potential of satellite solar power. I calculated, on what I believe are conservative assumptions, that satellite solar power as an export product could be from a two trillion dollar per year market to a six trillion dollar per year market fifty years from now. That's revenues from which profits can be
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