Senator Ford. How many uncertainties did we have, say, going into the Apollo program? Dr. Greenblat. Let me ask Mr. Maynard. Mr. Maynard. In the microwave power transmission area, of the nine areas that Dr. Greenblat referred to, included in those nine, at a higher level of breakdown, we identified 24 areas of critical technology. And they are identified as being—we don't exactly know how to do these things at this point in time, but we have confidence that we would be able to do them, to support the program time schedule. Now, I think at the start of the Apollo program, say, after contract award to Rockwell and Grumman, I only know of a couple of areas in the Apollo program that were like that—the fullscale characteristics of the heat shield and super-critical .helium in the lunar module descent stage. Thev were in that questionable area. And you do not like to have anv of those things in a program when you commit to actuallv doing it. So if you are to commit to prototype, you want to have all those things go away. At this point in time, in the microwave power transmission area, we identified 24 such items. And we have also identified development programs to resolve those issues in the time period to support an orbital demonstration in 1985. And we think that those are pretty reasonable technology development programs to implement. I think one other thing—in conducting such a technology development program, all the way up to an orbital demonstration, they should—and in the past they have been conducted in such a manner that if, after a year or two, it becomes abundantly clear that there is a certain approach that is not proper, that either the program should be shut off or you should change your approach, and so forth, so that the general management technique in this early development should be like it has been in the past in NASA space programs where they have the option to terminate it and really not make a commitment at this point in time to go to a prototype, as Dr. Heiss says. I think that is a little rambly, but perhaps that gets to your question. Mr. Kelly. I would like to add a comment to that, if I may. When Grumman began the design of the Apollo lunar module back in the early sixties, why, what we had then was an engineering concept which we believed to be sound. We had specific design approaches in mind for the various subsystems. But in some areas we were pressing the state of the art, if you will, in that we were going to require higher performance or better performance than had been demonstrated up to that point in time. We also had a couple of areas—most notable was the question of actually conducting a manned landing on the moon—which nobody had any specific experience with in the past. And, further, which was rather difficult to simulate realistically on earth. So we went all the way from engineering areas where we felt very comfortable all the way to an area like the lunar landing where we felt that we would have to be extremely cautious and careful in the development program. Now, there are elements of all these same aspects in the SSPS. I think somewhat more of them are in this high-risk we-have-never- done-it-before category, but, at the same time, we do have engineering concepts and design approaches that appear to our current level of knowledge to have a sound basis.
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