Therefore, I believe that the United States, in cooperation with others who so choose, should commit, at the earliest possible date to a "new national goal," an overarching objective of sufficient attraction and human benefit to rally knowledge, resources and public support to achieve it. That goal is: The opening of the high frontier-the establishment of the first nonterrestrial, productive base by the year 2000 for human benefit through the use of resources beyond the biosphere of Earth.

This goal is different in kind from any interim step. It gains access to nonterrestrial rather than terrestrial resources. It secures an operating base in an open system beyond our own Earth.

We need no longer fight over limited resources, but we can work together to create new resources for all. It is a unifying goal.

The economic benefits, if proven feasible technologically, are unlimited. It is an investment rather than an expenditure.

We do not even know that any increase in the overall Federal Budget will be required.

We are not proposing a reckless leap into the unknown. We are calling for deliberate and urgent study of this goal now.

The opening of the high frontier includes many key incremental steps proposed by other witnesses. But by establishing an overarching objective it provides rational criteria with which to evaluate many contending interim objectives, and none of the worthy milestones are of sufficient benefit alone to give direction, continuity, and purpose to the space program as a whole. The development of the high frontier gives a profound and unending rationale for each step. Each step becomes a step to somewhere rather than nowhere.

The goal of opening the high frontier gives birth to a world dream, a positive vision of our common destiny, an unlimited horizon for our children, an idea that every parent can understand.

Our image of the future is a propelling power and will transform history.

However, the immediate pragmatic benefits of this goal are also high. Such a national commitment may not be the full answer to any problem but it may prove, I believe, it will prove to be, the extra missing element to many of our most intractible problems-poverty, war, energy, the gap between the developed and developing worlds. It will have pragmatic social and economic benefits, and I believe the public is ready.

A recent Harris poll on public attitude as to what will make this country great in the future found at the top of the list "scientific research." An amazing "91 percent believe it will be a major factor in America's future success." Technological genius and industrial knowhow are considered a key by 78 to 80 percent of the American people. The challenge of the high frontier can stimulate the recreation of the movement for the future, the fundamental faith of the American people. Our ancestors are the frustrated, the poor, the divinely discontent people from all races and cultures. This is our greatness.

If we embrace this new goal, we will not only reinvigorate the spirit of the future, but the meaning of freedom.

Experimentally, freedom lives at the edge of the possible, between the known and the unknown, beckoning individual potential.

Perhaps most important in the long run is the significance of how the high frontier is developed, by those who believe in democratic institutions and individual rights, or those who do not.

It is vital that democracies throughout the world join in closer cooperation to pioneer this frontier. The new basis of unity of free people is not in conflict with cooperation with the Soviet Union. But it will remagnetize and enhance the idea of freedom in the human mind, where the fundamental revolutions occur.

What will make it happen? How is a goal of this magnitude established? Some say only catastrophe or extreme competition will move people to new action.

I believe we can decide on our own free will. But this has yet to be tested. A democracy has never been required consciously to commit to a consciously positive social goal of this long range benefit and potential.

Others say it is inevitable that we will go into space, and we are so proceeding, and nothing more need to be done. I fear this is not so. As far as I can see the present administration does not seem to see value in the high frontier goal. It is common knowledge that the President has set up a committee to establish national goals in space. I urge the committee on Science and Technology to bring to the President as much as possible the new information from those who fully understand it before he commits to a public goal.

Furthermore, while there is substantial NASA support for the high frontier goal at the working level, there does not appear to be active support for it at the NASA administrative level. Therefore, support tends to go underground.

The aerospace industries are dependent on the attitude of their prime customer, NASA, as far as establishing new goals. To overcome this inertia we can only look to the people and to the Congress, which is sensitive to new ideas.

A citizen movement for the High Frontier is now forming with networks of concerned citizens in major fields of endeavor. New citizens groups are appearing, joining with the "ancient" Committee for the Future (1970) in this great task.

The advocates for the future have been given their first instrument for political action in the resolution introduced by Olin Teague, with a companion resolution introduced by Barbara Mikulski, Lindy Boggs, and David Stockman.

The resolution calls:

*** the Office of Technology Assessment to organize and manage a thorough study and analysis to determine the feasibility, potential consequences, advantages, and disadvantages of developing as a national goal for the year 2000 the first manned structures in space for the conversion of solar energy and other extraterrestrial resources to the peaceable and practical use of human beings everywhere.

For this study to have real meaning and to provide results which would actually permit the Congress to commit to such a national goal, it should include both a comprehensive evaluation of the social desirability and the initial critical technological research and develop

ment.

There is great value in the soft sciences part of the study. We must learn to look at long-range goals in a "wholistic" way, involving all impacted sectors of society, seeking "synergistic" benefits. We cannot

solve critical problems of energy, environment, economy, on a shortterm, single-issue basis. This study could serve as a new model of future-oriented decisionmaking. In that alone, it would make a real contribution.

In summation, I specifically urge the Committee on Science and Technology to:

1. Vigorously support the Shuttle, resisting any effort by the administration to cut it back.

2. Increase NASA's capacity for long-range planning.

3. Take expeditious action on Resolutions 451 and 447 by calling for hearings on it. I believe it would be of vital importance for the committee to hear the full case for the development of the High Frontier. It has never been fully brought together, and what can be done in a few moments is not sufficient for your judgment at all. 4. Call together immediately following this hearing a task force of members of the Committee on Science and Technology, along with interested competent citizens and appropriate members of OTA and other interested Members of Congress, to design the study which the resolution requests.

If the high frontier resolution is acted upon favorably, I believe it will become a seed of a Magna Carta for the Future, extending the freedom of humanity.

Let those who came before us be an inspiration to us. The torch of freedom has been passed generation to generation-from Pericles Funeral Oration, to the Magna Carta, to the Declaration of Independence, to the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Four Freedoms. Now it is our turn to carry forward with the High Frontier Resolution, which may become a next step for freedom.

Thank you.

Mr. TEAGUE. Thank you, Barbara. I think there is no question that time will come in space, just as in the aerospace industry, that civilians will be involved. When that time will come, I do not know. But I know our committee is interested, and we want to try to accomplish this goal.

Ms. HUBBARD. Thank you very much, Mr. Teague.

Mr. TEAGUE. Mr. O'Neill.

[The prepared statement of Dr. O'Neill follows:]

Testimony of Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill,

Princeton University

before the Committee on Science and Technology, House of Representatives, Jan. 25th, 1978

in support of House Concurrent Resolution 451

I'm here to

Thank you for the opportunity to present these views. report to you on great progress that's been made, on a unique opportunity that we now have to benefit this country and the world, and finally to point to a very big job still to be done. At the start I want to thank the several Congressional committees that have recognized the significance of this work from the start; and the hundreds of scientists and engineers in government, the universities and industry that have brought the paper study phase to a most successful conclusion; and the private citizens' groups, of which Mrs. Hubbard's is an outstanding example, that have supported this work from its first public discussion.

Humanity is now faced with urgent problems that far transcend in scope and timescale the duration of one American presidency. How to solve growing shortages of energy, how to reverse the present worldwide sink toward poverty, hunger, and military confrontation over diminishing resources. There are two alternative approaches:

One is to accept the inevitability of catastrophe, and do nothing except to monitor global resources, slow the pace of decline by conservation, and be ready to accept the harsh limits on human freedoms that an eventual global steady-state will impose. That is the counsel of the "limits-togrowth" apologists. It was expressed well in the article "After the Deluge, the Covenant" in Saturday Review-orld. That article imagines as a good solution a history of these next decades in which 65 million people die by starvation, many millions more die in nuclear wars, and ultimately nations such as our own surrender sovreignty to a worldwide Authority with control over all our nuclear weapons and power to equalize world food supplies by shipping American food abroad with or without our consent. Let me emphasize that I share with many people a belief that a reduction of population growth rates is a good thing. The fact is, though, that the only peaceful way that reduction has ever come about is by individual free choice, in an affluent, well-educated society. No one who calls himself human could regard as an acceptable alternative the enforced death of millions of children by famine.

The second approach to the global problems is, I believe, far more in keeping with our American tradition. That is to use all the science and engineering knowledge we now have in a vigorous, immediate attack on these urgent problems, in a way that will leave us the individual freedoms we have fought for during the past two hundred years. And in the course of that solution, to preserve and protect the fragile biosphere of our Earth.

The fatalism of the limits-to-growth alternative is reasonable only if one ignores all the resources beyond our atmosphere, resources thousands of times greater than we could ever obtain from our beleaguered Earth. As expressed very beautifully in the language of House Concurrent Pesolution 451, "this tiny Earth is not humanity's prison, is not a closed and dwindling resource, but is in fact only part of a vast system rich in opportunities, a "high frontier" which irresistibly beckons and challenges the American genius."

My own background is in pure science, in the search for scientific truth such as the measurement of the size of the electron. Yet I believe that efforts of pure science, with no practical application for many decades, must be accompanied by the immediate application of science wherever possible to humanity's urgent problems.

I'm reporting on an apparent solution to the limits-to-growth problem, based on fundamental facts of science that will never change: First, that while we search desperately for new energy resources here on the Earth, a few thousand miles above our heads there streams by constantly, night and day, a flood of high-intensity solar energy far greater than we could ever need.

Second, that already we know of materials resources, for large-scale industrial activities in space, thousands of times greater than we could ever obtain from the Earth without despoiling it completely. We spent, in todays dollars, fifty billions on the Apollo project. As a result we know that the lunar surface is one third metals, usable for manufactured products, one fifth silicon, ideal for solar cells and electronics, and more than forty percent oxygen, essential in life-support. I say we should use that knowledge, not throw it away or ignore it.

Already we know that there are special groups of asteroids, with orbits close to the Earth, that are rich not only in the minerals found on the Moon but also in the organic-chemistry building-blocks needed for a complete industrial economy.

Last of three basic scientific facts, we know that the cost in energy to transport materials from the lunar surface into free space, where it can be used by a totally solar-powered industry, is less than a twentieth as large as the energy cost to transport similar materials up from the Earth.

It makes sense to put at least a small fraction of our total national effort, perhaps one part in ten thousand of our federal budget, into exploring over the next several years how we can use these basic scientific facts to break through the limits to growth and solve the urgent worldwide problems.

In addition to the eternal truths of science, there are facts of current events, that must be heeded in any practical program.

First, the Shuttle is the only vehicle system that will be operational for at least the next decade, and that can give us a toe-hold on the High

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