Reply for the record to Mr. Teague's question to Dr. G. K. O'Neill on the needs for High Frontier research as called for by House Con. Res. 451:

"The immediate need is for survival of the work. There was a good start with modest funding from NASA from early 1975 through mid-1977. All present NASA activity in High Frontier research is a carry-over from that earlier period. In fiscal 1978, though, NASA support to Princeton, which leads the work, has been sharply reduced. Only $20,000 has been received in six months for a group whose operating level is $100,000/year. (This is item (1) of the list below). Temporarily, we have been able to maintain the effort by public donations to the Space Studies Institute, a nonprofit corporation formed in 1977. The most urgent need is to provide from governmental funds that basic $100,000/year that supports the planning, direction and continued drive from Princeton. To push ahead at full speed, the work requires a nationwide research effort totalling just over $1 million in FY 78. Princeton's share would be about 20%. The highest priorities are:

(1)

Planning, direction and the initiation of new cost-saving concepts. Lead a cooperative effort to outline research program FY 79 and thereafter. $100,000. (Princeton).

(2) Construction of a second mass-driver model, to reach high subsonic speed during calendar 1978. An existing NASA grant of $70,000, divided between Princeton and MIT, is sufficient only for paper studies. Materials and equipment requirement: $100,000. (Princeton/MIT).

(3) Bench-chemistry pilot plant for the processing of minerals identical to the lunar soils (anorthosites). An existing NASA grant to the Lunar Science Institute is sufficient only for paper studies. Estimated requirement in FY 78: $250,000. (Contractor work).

(4) Mass-driver reaction-engine structural and guidance analysis. Estimated requirement: $200,000. Essential for cost-reduction of heavy lift beyond low orbit. (Contractor work).

(5) Critical-path analysis. A flexible computer-program that would accept different experts' varying estimates of research and development costs and times, and would allow the systematic layout of the most efficient, lowest-cost route to obtain positive payback at the earliest time. Once made, this program could be updated regularly to save money and time as the research continues. Estimated cost: $150,000. (Contractor work).

(6) Initial design of sample structures for construction from lunar materials to check stability, mass, and construction (fabrication) methods. $200,000. (Contractor work).

(7) Observational astronomy research to find, identify, and analyse by reflected sunlight new Earth-crossing asteroids, as materials resources. $100,000. (Several universities).

The total of these research efforts is $1.1 million. If that money cannot be found in FY 78, realistically the High Frontier research effort will be delayed by six months to one year. The most serious consequence of that delay would be the further divergence of the Administration's planning and development away from the High Frontier option, making decisions that will be increasingly hard to reverse. (Dr. James Fletcher, the previous Administrator of NASA, has informed our group that it was his intention to fund that necessary $1 million for FY 78, had he continued in office.)

Timescale and payback:

If the momentum in High Frontier research can be regained after its slowdown during the past few months, the optimum schedule will be:

(1) Research effort totalling just over one million dollars, initiated in FY 78 (this year). My colleagues and I recommend that these funds be administered through the Universities Space Research Association of Houston, Texas. That organization has years of successful experience in research management with government funding and has an organizational framework already on hand to manage a further effort of this kind.

(2) An evaluation of benefits and impacts of an implementation of the High Frontier program in the areas of jobs, the economy, balance of payments, international relations, and security. We recommend that this study be made by the Office of Technology Assessment of Congress. That body should be asked for its estimates of the funding necessary for its study.

(3) A two-year program of engineering studies and hardware development, based on the plans to be worked out during FY 78. Earlier NASA studies indicate that this could be done for about $5 million in FY 79 and $10 to 15 million in FY 80. In parallel, the O.T.A. study would be extended and refined to get more exact answers.

(4) In calendar 1980, on the basis of the three-year program just described, Congress and the President would have the data on which they could base a decision to recommend or not to recommend to the people of the United States the adoption of the High Frontier as a beneficial national goal and to estimate investment cost, payback schedule, and the degree to which the program should be international.

(5)

1981-1984. A four-year period of intensive engineering development and orbital test, equivalent to the years 1961-1965 of the Apollo program, the years in which Mercury and Gemini gave us our first hard data on the possibilities for manned operations in orbit. At any time during the period 1981-84 the program could be cut off if any unforseen fundamental block were to develop. Estimated investment during that period would total about half of an Apollo project, or $6 billion per year in today's dollars (i.e., approximately one percent of the Federal budget during the same period). The Shuttle would be used heavily for the necessary orbital research.

(6) 1985-92: Implementation of the program: Approximately 50 to 60 Shuttle flights per year to lift all the necessary equipment, propellant, and personnel necessary for the initiation of lunar-materials transport, and for a bootstrap development of industry in space to a level of processing 600,000 tons/year of lunar material. Total investment during that period is estimated by the latest NASA studies as $40 to $50 billion (a continuation of the 1981-84 program at the same level of approximately $6 billion/year, 1% of the Federal budget).

(7)

1992-- Commencement of payback at the rate of $20 billion per year in value, based on finished products valued at $100/kilogram in geosynchronous or higher orbit. That figure corresponds, for example, to two power satellites of 10 Gw each, with a mass of 100,000 tons each sold to utilities consortiums or to other nations at a price of $1,000/kw. That price would be quite competitive: the Churchill Falls hydroelectric installation (Quebec Hydro), currently the largest in this hemisphere, cost $1,600/kw and yields power at a lower cost than its coal or nuclear competitors.

(8) 1992-2004: Period of exponential buildup of productivity in space, doubling every 3 to 4 years, to an annual product with value $200-$400 billions per year, given a market of sufficient size.

This program assumes no further delays in decisions and implies a commitment by 1980 equivalent to the Apollo decision of 1961. Most experts within NASA agree on the total length of the program (approximately fifteen years), given adequate decision-speed. Their varying guesses at the political decision-making process lead them to disagree on the time of productive payback, but only within the narrow range 1992-1999. The phrase "within this century" is appropriate."

There is a separate $4 million program, cooperative between NASA and DOE, on the study of satellite solar power. That study could be very beneficial, but I am personally quite disturbed about the way it has been planned, for several reasons.

First, only $112 million of the $4 million will go to NASA, and NASA is prohibited from using even that amount for systems studies an area where NASA has great expertise.

Second, NASA is asked to come up with what is called a preferred configuration of the satellite power station within about 18 months, which seems to me extremely premature. We are nowhere near the point where we know how to design a station in the optimum way. Because of the pressure of time, the study will ignore many options, such as nonterrestrial materials, that could change the economic and environmental picture drastically, possibly from no-go to go.

Then DOE is supposed to evaluate that design, already locked into and frozen, and see whether it works and whether it is economically competitive, environmentally acceptable and so on. We simply don't know enough, and with all due respect, I don't think anyone can know enough to make a sound judgment on that basis in that short a time. If the same funds were spent on pushing ahead on technical research, on small-scale tests, and experiments on microwave effects of the kind Dr. Handler has brought up, we would get a lot more for the money.

Mr. FLIPPO. I would like to ask any member of the panel if I might, Mr. Chairman, if you could identify the essential-well, first of all, are there major technological breakthroughs that must be accomplished before we can put a solar satellite into place?

Dr. O'NEILL. As a physicist who has been involved in nuclear and high-energy physics for a long time and now more recently in the space studies field, I do not think there are what I would call scientific breakthroughs required.

As an experimental physicist who has spent some 25 years making apparatus that had to work, if I had to make a satellite power station work within a fixed timeframe at the price of my life, or alternatively a fusion power station within the same timeframe, I would choose satellite power. That's a personal decision. It represents the fact that in the fusion case I think there is substantial necessary basic scientific information yet to be learned, while in the case of satellite power there is only a long hard job of engineering. There's the difference.

Dr. HANDLER. May I add one more point?

As long as what we are talking about is now what can be done in space or the ideal of the high frontier, but in dealing with the Nation's immediate problems to which reference has been made, namely, $45 billion a year of oil imports, sir, you are not going to solve that problem with the solar space station or even by fusion.

These things make electricity for us and we don't have an electricity generating crisis. We have a petroleum, a liquid and gas fuel crisis. That is a different question you have set out to solve.

It is one which is important. But as soon as you start using the $45 billion oil imports as the thrust, you are finding the wrong solution to the right question.

Mr. FLIPPO. In dealing with whether or not we should build a space satellite, it is a decision that is certainly one for proper debate, but would you reply to the question as to whether or not there are major

technological breakthroughs necessary before we can put a solar power satellite in space?

Dr. HANDLER. Probably no.

Mr. ADAMS. I would agree.

Mr. FLIPPO. Prior to us putting a man on the moon or prior to President Kennedy dedicating this Nation to that effort, it was generally agreed that no major technological breakthroughs were needed to do that. We may be in the same situation now.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. TEAGUE. Mr. Stockman.

Mr. STOCKMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank you for inviting me to come by today. I am not a member of this committee, but I am a member of the Energy and Power Subcommittee and also the new Population Committee.

The more I study the issues in those two areas, the more I become convinced of the importance of this committee and the concepts we are discussing today. I would like to turn the discussion to Dr. O'Neill and phrase it this way: Throughout your presentation, you emphasize the potential feasibility of the high frontier concept, solar generation in space and so forth. And you discuss the work that has been done on the mass-driver and some of the comparative studies done on energy costs of lifting material from the Earth versus using lunar sources and so forth.

I think those things are important, but they're not enough, because obviously there are many things that are feasible to do scientifically that involve great resources that we may not want to do.

There has to be some more important reason or important driving force other than feasibility. The one that impresses me from the work that I have been doing both in the population and energy areas is the force of necessity.

As Chairman Scheuer, who is here today, from our committee could probably tell you, from the information we have available today, barring some total change in the attitudes of governments around the world about population planning and control, there is no way that the population of this planet will stabilize at anything less than 12 to 14 billion, maybe a little less. But that's the best we can hope for.

Now, unless we want to envision some world in the next century or so which is characterized by some kind of malthusian horror the fact is that when you begin to calculate the resource requirements and the absorptive requirements in terms of the biosphere and the Earth to support a population that large at even a minimally decent standard of living you run into some numbers that point to necessity and seem to provide an underlying rationale for what you are doing. That is one of the reasons I am sponsoring the resolution.

At this point I just did some quick calculations and the fact is that if we were to stabilize the world's population at 12 billion at the end of the next century and we were to expect that the population of the world at that time would have a standard of living only like what we have today, which really is something you would hope for as a minimum, the fact is it would require the equivalent of something like 732 billion barrels of oil equivalent energy per year to support that kind of population at current per capita GNP levels in this country.

And even assuming that we had major improvements in conversion efficiency in the way we use energy, the fact is that 732 billion barrels