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Statement of Charles Sheffield

to the

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology

Olin E. Teague, Chairman

January 24th, 1978.

CHARLES SHEFFIELD

Dr. Sheffield is Vice President of Earth Satellite Corporation and First Vice President of the American Astronautical Society.

Born and educated in England, he immigrated to the United States in 1962 and joined Computer Usage Company, one of the first independent computer software companies. His involvement in the U.S. Space Program began in 1963, with the U.S. Navy's satellite geodesy program, and has continued ever since. In 1968 he served as a consultant to NASA on the

computational implications of the forthcoming series of earth resources satellites, and in 1969 began the development of wholly digital methods for reduction and information extraction of earth resources data. In 1971, he joined Earth Satellite Corporation and led the programs to supplement traditional photo-interpretation efforts with computerized analyses.

Dr. Sheffield was Chairman of the Space Flight Mechanics Committee of the AAS in 1974-75, and Vice President of Publications in 1975-76. He is a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society and of the British Interplanetary Society.

Dr. Sheffield holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in mathematics and a Ph.D in theoretical physics. He has published about fifty refereed papers on

a variety of subjects, including nuclear physics, orbit computation, earth resources, gravitational field analysis, large-scale computer systems and general relativity.

Statement of Charles Sheffield, Vice President, Earth Satellite
Corporation, to the House Committee on Science and Technology;
Olin Teague, Chairman.

Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee on Science and Technology, I am honored to be here today and to serve as a witness to these special hearings.

I am a Vice President of Earth Satellite Corporation, and also serve as First Vice President of the American Astronautical Society. I will be wearing both those hats in this testimony. One role is directly involved in immediate practical application of the NASA Earth Resources Program, the other takes a broader view of the whole of the U.S. space activity. I think that my view of the future of our space program, reflecting both those roles, is best given in concrete terms. To do this, I propose to offer a specific twenty-year plan for a U.S. Space Program. That plan embodies three major elements:

1)

2)

and 3)

My perception of the best combination of immediate application
and long-range development activities,

The complementary roles of manned and unmanned programs,
An approach which keeps maximum flexibility, by deferring
policy decisions as long as possible. I will explain what I
mean by this later in the testimony.

Like all the witnesses who will appear before this Committee, I speak from a certain pre-established set of convictions. To avoid confusion, I would like to state these assumptions explicitly, before moving to offer the key elements of the plan. Let me begin by quoting one of your colleagues: "We all know that it has more than three times as many mountains,

inaccessible and rocky hills, and sandy wastes, as are possessed by any State of the Union. But how much is there of useful land? How much that

may be made to contribute to the support of man and of society? These ought to be the questions...the agricultural products of the whole surface... never will be equal to one half part of those of the State of Illinois; no, nor yet a fourth, or perhaps a tenth part."

This sounds as if it might be a commentary on a proposed lunar program, or perhaps taken from a speech about the Viking Mars-landers. It is not. It is taken from a speech made in the Senate by Daniel Webster, on the 27th of June, 1850. His remarks referred to the State of California. They were made in connection with the proposed admission of that territory to the Union of States.

Although there are certain members of the Eastern littoral who will still maintain that California is no more than a vast desert of one sort or another, I suggest that this is now a minority viewpoint. I introduce Mr. Webster's words here to illustrate that the value of a development or of a territory, in the long run, is unknowable. The best opinion of intelligent men, less than a century ago, held Alaska to be a barren and worthless tract of frozen wasteland.

What does this prove? To quote a source quite a bit older than Mr. Webster, "Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail." I believe that the long-range benefits that may come to the United States from an active Space Program cannot be estimated, today, with the slightest hope of success. Yet many of NASA's present and proposed activities have been judged in the past by cost-benefit analyses.

Such studies can be very useful when you know both the costs and the benefits, and are seeking to chose among several well-defined alternatives. When the benefits are inestimable (I am using the word literally) cost

benefit methods are much inferior to the judgment of intelligent men and women. Sometimes the techniques are used to avoid going out on the line with a personal decision; more often, they emasculate the authority of the men and women who run the U.S. Space Program.

This leads me to my first assumption in developing a program plan. Assumption 1: A rational series of long-range priorities for the U.S.

Space Program cannot be established using only cost-benefit or any other

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accounting method.

Cost-benefit analysis is usually blind to higher goals. With that

approach, no one would ever marry or have children.

We are also not as smart as we would like to be about either the

potential pay-off of space development, or of the problems that we may encounter along the way. This means that we must maintain a flexible approach, one that can adapt to changing problems and solutions. In practice, that means that we will need man in space, as well as machines, for the foreseeable future.

This view is not universally accepted, and it is true that many applications can be handled with unmanned spacecraft, good telemetry equipment, and powerful on-board computers. But many cannot. Hence: Assumption 2: The manned program is an essential on-going part of the U.S. Space Program.

I do think that the role of man in space will have to change, and change in a way that will be unpopular with the original group of astronauts. It won't do to restrict space to perfect physical specimens who can stand ten gee without wincing. Space must become accessible to people like us, people who don't see too well, who feel dizzy in a highspeed elevator. The plan I propose includes scientists, technicians and plumbers in space, as well as astronauts.

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