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PRESENTED BY WITNESS

Statement of

Dr. Robert A. Frosch.
Administrator

NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION

before the

Committee on Science and Technology
House of Representatives

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:

In examining the several future directions that the United States space programs can take, and in considering the major goals and objectives that might be selected for those programs, it may be worthwhile to assess the more immediate present in terms of the conditions obtaining today. We appear to be standing on the threshold of several interlocking revolutions in our perceptions of space activity; indeed, in some cases, we are already well into the first phases of such revolutions without, perhaps, having had time to recognize this fact.

The most visible change for which we are preparing is in the basic approach to space flight. For twenty years we have had to reach for the benefits of space in small, expensive, prepackaged increments. Each mission has been such an increment, with its long lead time, one-way transportation system, weight and volume constraint, demands for redundancy, extraordinary test rigors, and conservative failure margins. These first decades of space exploration and application have, in their own right, been extraordinarily successful, but that success has had to be paid for in money and in deferrals of tasks too risky to attempt in the one-way mode of the expendable launch vehicle. In one sense, our first ventures into space may be seen as a necessary primitive beginning needed to lead us toward the recognition that the real values of space require a significant revolution in the way of doing business. The coming advent of the Space Shuttle is already changing that way of doing business, clearly in some visible and direct ways, and also in some more subtle ways. The early Shuttle missions we will see are relatively straightforward evolutionary extensions of present approaches: the Shuttle is a launch vehicle to place carefully designed and constricted payloads into orbit more efficiently than an expendable vehicle.

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It will take time before the larger impact of the new capability becomes evident, before we recognize that we can now afford in space an approach to experiments similar to that we use on the ground, because of the easy presence of the human experimenter, supervisor, technician, or repairman. It will be some time before we recognize that the machines we need in space can in some cases best be built there rather than on the ground where they must be artificially compressed into reduced volumes for space delivery and deployment. We will have to stop thinking in terms of discrete space missions, each with its own spacecraft, its own control center, its own ground network, its own clientele; space machinery is becoming recyclable and refurbishable and reusable. We are just beginning, for example, to look at earth orbital scientific exploration in the Shuttle era as a continuum rather than as a jerky and uncertain sequence of "new starts"; we are moving to the time when the engineering component of scientific research will cease to dominate the kind and quality of research we can do. We will find we can reintroduce the concept of taking some risks with the success of individual experiments because we can act to avoid the consequences of failures without enormous waste. The technological revolution in space transportation, that the Shuttle by itself represents, will become ever more important as this same class of capability grows to include greater flexibility in space operations at synchronous altitudes and for extended duration. It will take time, effort, and vision to learn how to use what we have built; we can be certain, however, that it is the generation today in school and just beginning to consider the opportunities of space that will exercise these capabilities to their fullest and bring them to fruition.

In parallel with the changes in how we will be operating in space are the implications for what we can do there. Perhaps the best current example in science is that of the space telescope, now beginning its development phase. It is important to realize that astronomers have been planning for the telescope since the early sixties-- and that only the advent of Shuttle revisit for orbital maintenance has made it practical. The space telescope is our first true facility in space, now not much more remote from human attention than are the more limited instruments we have built on mountain tops around the world. If we succeed in forcing ourselves to design and build and operate the telescope with that in mind, we will have made an investment of permanent value; there is no natural lifetime for a permanent observatory of this power and with such capacity for evolutionary improvement.

Some have already stated that it will be the centerpiece of

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twentieth century science and that its scientific
contributions to the understanding of the physics of the
universe are likely to dwarf all but the most fundamental
discoveries of the past. And the space telescope is but
a single example of the new kind of permanence we have
infused into space exploration and exploitation by simply
changing our way of getting there and back.

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We are at the beginning of another revolution today as well: one in communications. It would be appropriate to term this the "second communications revolution," since the satellite developments of the past fifteen years have already completely changed domestic and international pointto-point telecommunications traffic. The Intelsat consortium already boasts of 92 member nations from Afghanistan to Zambia; in many places it is far easier and more assured to make a transcontinental phone call than to try to reach the next town. Just around the corner, however, and already adumbrated by some of our experiments and those of the Japanese, the Canadians, and the Europeans, is a next quantum jump in this field. Higher power, higher data rates, better frequency manipulation and now the new possibility of centralizing efficiently in space those facilities like switchboards and mainframes that are replicated everywhere on earth -- are pointing toward an era of service capabilities that can change society. we have committed, in the space program, to the concept of commercial tracking and data relay satellite services to eliminate the bottlenecks of being tied down to multiple local ground stations for contact with our space systems; this alone has created a new dimension of freedom for space operations. The geometry of the world and the space around it, coupled with the technological capability to build large antennas and supporting facilities in space while vastly simplifying and reducing ground terminal size and complexity, make the possibility of hemispheric interconnections at the "CB" level a reality. Concepts of public service telecommunications like electronic mail, medical informtion service delivery, continuing interactive education, and broadly based information access now await implementation decisions rather than technological feasibility demonstration.

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Perhaps the most profound change we face as a result of the space program today lies in our growing ability to deal with our own planet. At this juncture, the ideological distinctions between science and applications, between experimental and operational, even between one agency's data responsibilities and those of another, are artificial

and even trivial. What is clear is that we have at hand an incredibly sophisticated set of tools for understanding the earth and its environment. We can map in three dimensions daily and seasonal changes, natural and manmade, on the earth's surface whether wet or dry. We can see the clouds form and move and dissipate, and can deduce the weather activity below them. We can sound the atmosphere, measure its constituents, trace the circulation of particulates. We can take the temperature of the earth and ocean at any place or time. We can follow ocean currents and identify water quality. We can define the energy budget of the planet, and separate its various components by source and type. We can observe the chemistry at the many interfaces of solar energy with the atmosphere, the ocean's surface, and the land. We can compare the history and behaviour of our planet with that of the moon, the near and far planets, and the other bodies in the solar system. We can monitor the sun.

Taken together, these capabilities fall under the general heading of remote sensing the acquisition of data by instruments from a distance. The dimensions that space has added are those of global coverage, continuity of coverage, and near-real time data return to earth. It is not too much to say that in remote sensing lies one of the great keys to wise management of the planet as the home of humanity. Remote sensing can be one of the major utilities of space in practical terms -- but only if turned to practical ends. The increasingly sharp challenge we face is that of integrating this extraordinarily rich flow of data into discrete and useful sets of information that can be acted upon or responded to at every level of the world society. Understanding of weather, climate, crops, natural resources, and the effect of human activity on the world ecology are the basic informational goals we should set for ourselves, given the tools already in being and being made available through the advances of technology. We need a change of perceptive scale to integrate all that we can learn about the pieces into all that we need to know about the whole.

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There is a tentative conclusion at this time: the major issues are not what we can do as a nation or as a civilization but what we should do. And perhaps more complex still is the question of what should we be doing now to create at least the options for an optimistic technological world view in the future. Programmatic questions become inevitably linked to policy issues of great import: for example, how and under what conditions should the advanced remote sensing systems graduate from their present R&D form to a different status? What are the political risks and benefits of, say, deciding to stop

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further Federal investment, of chartering private enterprise

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in this field, of organizing an international consortium for continuity of service, or of establishing a new Federal operational system? These questions, among many others, have been under debate for years even before the first Landsat launch in 1972 and while the technology has improved radically over this period, and the uses to which such data can be usefully put have expanded exponentially, we need to work as hard in addressing the question of how best to capitalize on the large past investment and turn promise into routine reality.

There are similar policy considerations in the fields of advanced communications services, power generation, nuclear waste disposal, information storage and retrieval. These do not, to a first order, require decisions that are constrained by the budgetary context; appropriate development programs can be phased within reasonable and affordable resource levels. These are issues whose resolution would give clear focus to R&D effort and management planning, in space and on the ground. The scientific and technological strength of this country does not and cannot grow in a vacuum, nor does it flourish when dedicated solely to the most immediate or near-term objectives. It is the art of government to organize its efforts to serve both immediate and far-reaching goals with the same resources. Space and all that entails in science, in exploration, in discovery, in technology, and in services is one of those resources for both the

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present and the future. A unique characteristic of space activity is that it radically changes the scale within which we can measure and judge our national directions. We as a nation must decide wisely and well -- and soon how best to employ it for the good of the nation, the civilization, and the generations to come. We do not wish to let pass by valuable opportunities unexploited or important challenges unmet.

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