Mr. FUQUA. Mr. Sheffield, a similar type question. I think you mentioned in your statement that NASA had done very well in R. & D. but they were not an operational agency.

Mr. SHEFFIELD. I think a real problem here is that NASA is not an operational agency, but the process by which activities undertaken by NASA or any Government agency, to move things from the public to private sector, is very poorly defined. To give you two examples, NASA and other Government agencies are very much into the weather satellite business and the earth resources satellite business. My own fear is that public management is so entrenched in those programs, and the procedures by which industry can get into them are so poorly defined, that we can't force the transition.

In other words, even though the logic and the economics may say that this program is operational and economical, and what the devil is Government doing in it at all, you have to create a mechanism for divestiture from the public to the private sector; and I don't see those mechanisms. Until they are introduced, I find it hard to see how industry can hope to take over. It is almost worse than that. It is that when industry is already doing something, in some cases the Government then tends to get into it also. So not only is there no divestiture, but there is an encroachment on the private sector by the public sector. I don't know how you cure that.

Mr. FUQUA. Mr. Roe?

Mr. ROE. No questions.

Mr. FUQUA. Mr. Milford?

Mr. MILFORD. I just had a couple of questions for Mr. Stine. In your statement you mentioned the possible use of the Space Shuttle external tanks. I am curious as to what usage you could make of those.

Mr. STRINE. As I mentioned in my statement, sir, it is a pressurized insulated area and can be utilized much in the way perhaps as Skylab was. It doesn't take much more to put it into orbit. There have been some studies made as to what it would take to put it into orbit. There have been some very fine pieces of artwork done showing this in orbit with a 25-kilowatt power unit on the end of it and a small space industrial experimental lab inside of it. It is a pressurized insulated volume and that is going to be useful anywhere where you have people working in a vacuum.

Mr. MILFORD. Do you have in mind constructing or installing the equipment after it is in orbit?

Mr. STINE. Yes, sir, installing the equipment in it after it is in orbit. We would probably have to make some engineering tradeoff studies, but those things are going up there once a week and with a little extra Delta V it could be left there. Pretty soon you could have quite a number of them up there. And this makes a very large volume, much larger than Spacelab, for you to use, move things into and utilize for whatever purposes you want.

As I say, make it available to industry to use it as a free resource. Mr. MILFORD. That might tie into the proposal the gentleman made on initiating a tug that would go all the way to synchronous altitude. Would you possibly kill two birds with one stone if you took the shuttle to a higher altitude than it is now going, or is that feasible or possible?

Mr. STINE. I think we have the man here who is responsible for the Shuttle this morning, and I certainly would like to defer that answer to him.

Mr. JEFFS. It is two separate questions, really. I think you could say that there are possibilities of using the tank for certain kinds of applications, but I would think that if we were going after a normal transfer vehicle, that it would be a system separate from one built around the external tank.

Mr. MILFORD. Is that feasible to go to synchronous altitude with any type of vehicle?

Mr. JEFFS. I'm not sure what type of vehicle.

Mr. MILFORD. I have no particular vehicle in mind, but just in trying to get to synchronous altitude, I'm wondering what we are faced with.

Mr. JEFFS. There have been a number of development studies which have been in the works for some time. There is that program for about a 20,000-pound hydrogen, oxygen, and engine which would be a potential for an orbital transfer vehicle. You don't need much velocity, but you need it for longer periods of time. You also get into this business of ion or electrical propulsion.

Mr. FUQUA. I think what the gentleman is asking is if the Shuttle has the capability to go above 400 miles.

Mr. JEFFS. It is 600 or 700 miles, and of course, the payload falls. off as the function of altitude.

Mr. FLIPPO. If you had additional fuel in the area of the payload, you could go into geosynchronous orbit.

Mr. JEFFS. You are speaking about whatever the potential energy differences are when you're speaking of the low altitude or the high altitude orbit. The Shuttle is not really defined for that at this point. There would be other modifications. There are duration requirements; for example, for the power generation systems and the environmental control systems. It takes time to get to geosyne and back. I don't think it would be very efficient to go to geosync with the Shuttle.

Mr. SHEFFIELD. I think the interim upper stage will get you there, but it is not reusable; whereas, the space tug should be reusable. I don't think there is any liquid fuel proposed interim upper stage. Is there anything on the books for that?

Mr. JEFFS. There is a lot of preliminary design work on hydrogen

oxygen.

Mr. SHEFFIELD. Everything is now solid fuel?

Mr. JEFFS. Yes.

Mr. SHEFFIELD. Ion propulsion would take you months to get there which is a problem. People wouldn't be too happy riding those.

Mr. STINE. As I recall from some figures I saw, that if you took the Space Shuttle orbiter and simply filled it full of propellant, you would just have enough to get it to geosynchronous orbit without any payload whatsoever, and you couldn't get it back.

Mr. FUQUA. Mr. Lujan.

Mr. LUJAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I only have one question. One of my usual concerns is the question of a nuclear waste disposal. In all of the markets that you surveyed, did you look at the disposal of nuclear wastes in space? I am really trying to tie it to the dis

cussion, but I want to know what is going on in space as far as nuclear waste disposal is concerned.

Mr. STINE. It is possible to dispose of nuclear waste in space because there is not much mass there and certainly not much volume. There may be more economical ways to do it. There was one of the things we looked at which appeared that were better terrestrial alternatives if we did dispose of it in space. The most efficient way to do it would be to throw it into interstellar space rather than into the Sun.

On the other hand, we want to look at the fact that the so-called nuclear waste material 100 years from now may be a valuable resource. We may not want to throw it away. We may want to park it in orbit somewhere.

Mr. LUJAN. That's my followup question. Is there some retrievable way?

Mr. STINE. There's a lot of room out there and a lot of orbits.

Mr. LUJAN. We were in Mr. Watkins' district, and one of the things. I saw from one of the buildings was that waste is a resource that is not placed in the proper place; coke bottles, cans or papers, or stuff like that. It should be put in the right place. And that's why the retrievable aspects of it would be so attractive.

Can you give me just a little bit more on waste disposal in space? Mr. STINE. Yes, sir. This is one of the markets that we surveyed. In my written statement it says that potential revenue from peak annual nuclear waste disposal is around $1 billion and cumulative around $3 billion by the year 2010. It is not a big market. It could be done. It was not one of the larger markets.

Mr. LUJAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHEFFIELD. I cannot speak for Mr. Jeffs, but Mr. Stine and I both have written and sold science fiction stories. I have written stories about L-5 colonies, and working solar power satellite systems. I suspect that both of us have erred on the side of conservatism here, because we don't want our wild sides showing too much.

I do think that tomorrow you are going to get the other side of it. In a sense I made my statement deliberately on the pragmatics and on the engineering realities, as opposed to the dreams, because I believe you have that still to come later in the hearings.

Mr. STINE. I have some comments also. I did not admit to being a science fiction writer when I was asked to testify here. But if you want the real far-out dreams, I can take you as far out as you want to go, including interstellar flight and I have written about that too. I am interested in the critical period, which is the next 10 or 15 years, but I am also a pragmatic engineering type.

I do believe we are going to do space colonies, and that we will occupy the solar system. I do believe that Kraft Ehricke is absolutely correct when he talks about the extraterrestrial imperative. I want to see us go further from that. We have broken loose from the cage of Earth and there is a final frontier out there. What we are going to do out there will make Star Wars look like a quilting bee by the time we get through.

Anywhere that man has mass and energy to work with, the human race will go and they'll use it. It can go as far as the stars. They say that star track is 250 years in the future, but I think it is likely to

happen sooner than that. I am interested in the next 10 to 15 years, seeing it happen and seeing Americans do it.

Mr. JEFFS. Mr. Chairman, I guess I have to defend myself here. First off, the space program is very important to us, us at Rockwell and those of us who work on the space program. I think it is a thing that I would like to see, obviously, more of happen in my lifetime. However, to develop major elements of systems takes quite a few years unfortunately.

We tend to dream a lot, and when it comes right down to doing, we unfortunately run into the hard knocks of making it happen.

To develop a new engine system, for example, takes about 8 years. Now, maybe that's too long.

But nonetheless all these things take time. I think the space program has suffered very much for lack of a total overall plan. I think we have done kind of a piecemeal job in space, and we don't want to see that happen again. We think now is the time to try and really lay down a plan that has some stability to it and something so that each step along the way is understandable as it relates to intermediate final objectives, if you will.

I think that we have to, therefore, do those things that do not put us in the position of losing the confidence of the public or others that are looking at our program.

As a consequence, we have been fairly pragmatic in our approach. However, we have suggested that what we have as a goal is a center, for like the year 2000. I think that is a pretty ambitious kind of objective by itself, but it is a definite kind of goal that we can strive for and that I think we can attain with the technologies and capabilities we have. Even that's ambitious.

We would also like to protect ourselves and our kind of plan and approach here against the new developments that occur in the few years ahead so that we have it shaped right and we do not go after a solar power station because we may find it a heck of a lot better to generate energy in space using solar whether it is cells or other conversion devices. Maybe that's the place to do our work and make our products.

But we think that would give the kind of program the body for strength and direction of our activities. So I guess we haven't been as far out in our thinking, because we want to make it happen and we know what it takes to make it happen.

So therefore I think that unless we are very careful so that we don't project ourselves too far that it will never happen. We will be piecemealing again all the way along the line. We ought to very carefully select our goals and they should be ambitious and challenging and at the same time we can do it and we're not fooling anybody.

Mr. RUDD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is most gratifying to have a distinguished Arizonan present to cast a little sunshine and light on what is perhaps a dank atmosphere. Mr. Stine, you got into the field of what could be done with regard to the satellites, the competitive efforts.

But before we can get to Star Wars, I guess we have to cross some other bridges first. But this brings to mind the tremendous effort that is being made by Japan to capture the wherewithal needed to get there. I am not being critical, but I am trying to be factual, with regard to semiconductors and computers in the world today. This is a question for you and for all of you good gentlemen.

How do we counter that in a competitive way? You have mentioned the fact that maybe the Government should get more involved. But how do we really create the competitive spirit that is going to project us into a truly competitive effort with Japan and perhaps West Germany?

Mr. STINE. Mr. Rudd, you are absolutely correct in that both Japan and West Germany and some other European nations in addition to West Germany have really captured a good share of the communication satellite market away from the United States to where American firms must go overseas to buy certain components because either they are not made in the United States or they are made better or made cheaper overseas.

In many cases, American companies simply cannot compete at this point with overseas products in the area of communications ground

stations.

You are well aware of the problems Motorola has in this area.

Mr. RUDD. How can we project ourselves and how can this Congress and this committee and this Government work to create an atmosphere where we can compete? Is it diverse regulation, more funding, or what? These are general principles, but we have to start somewhere. Mr. STINE. I believe I addressed several of my recommendations directly into this area. One of them was that we must have a careful look now at the administrative rules and regulations, and some of the Federal laws, that are currently providing hurdles to technology growth or the amassing of necessary capital required to do some of these jobs in space.

The second recommendation I made was the interface organization between NASA and domestic industry. We have already started some of that. As I reported in my statement, some of the reaction we got was quite unexpected, and yet if you were on the industrial side of the house, it was quite anticipated.

NASA needs to work more closely with industry. And I think they can, they want to, and they will.

The first step in the solution of any problem is to determine that you have a problem that can be solved. We need to have some more time and put some more effort into looking at some of the specifics so that I can give you a specific answer to these problems.

I have had time working with the space industrialization study team over the last 16 months to identify some problems and say, hey, we've got to look at this. But we have not yet identified precisely what we think you should do. We would like to have the opportunity to do that.

I think Resolution 451 is aimed at that sort of thing. I guess I am going to have to give you answer that we don't know yet, and I would sure like to come back in a couple of years and give you exactly a specific answer.

Mr. RUDD. You made one recommendation indicating that perhaps we need to have teams go to work on this. Are you talking about teams drawing from different sectors of industry?

Mr. STINE. Yes, sir.

Mr. RUDD. Under the direction of the Government?

Mr. STINE. Let's take one specific thing

Mr. RUDD. And how far can they work without overstepping each other and getting in the way of the competitive spirit in our system and our way of living in this country?