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Comsat opened the era of space industrialization with this commercial venture. It was a private enterprise operation backed by numerous government supports and incentives. It was not the first such high-risk venture into a new frontier that was supported by and encouraged by a government, and our federal government in particular.

In almost every area where a physical or scientific frontier has become known, available, and ripe for use,

where the risks to private investors have been exceptionally high, where the return on investment times have been very long, and where very large amounts of capital have been required, there has emerged a government-business relationship. This relationship has taken many forms in the past. Examples in the history of the United States include the National Road of the late 18th Century, the canal system of the early 19th Century, the railroads of the mid-19th Century, the water and land reclamation projects in the American West in the early 20th Century, and the telephone and telegraph networks, radio, television, and commercial airlines.

Comsat was a new approach to a new business challenge, a Joint government-industry corporation of unique characteristics. It has been successful. It returned its first dividend to stockholders in the fourth quarter of 1970, six years after the initial stock offering. Federal income tax amounting to $5,347,000 was payable for 1970. Comsat has been in a profitable

position ever since. Its net income after taxes in the third quarter of 1977 was $9,547,000. The success of Comsat and the communication satellites has encouraged other private space communications ventures by American Telephone and Telepgraph, Western Union, and others. There will be more

to come because the communications area of space industrialization already has something that domestic industry looks for: a track record.

But something than money has come from this. It is totally impossible to properly assess the long-range impact of instantaneous worldwide communications upon the political, economic, and cultural aspects of human life on this planet. Space industrialization has therefore been going on for almost thirteen years and it has already been profitable as well as impacting our everyday lives.

The Three Areas of Space Industrialization

But communications is only one of three areas of space industrialization. The se three areas and some of their future propspects may be briefly summarized as follows:

Communications: The continuing and increasing use of

improved communications satellites to provide more complete communication of information between people and between data

systems.

Manufacturing: The budding field of fabrication of new and improved materials and biologicals that can be made only in the high vacuum and weightlessness of orbital space, or that can be made better because of these unique orbital conditions.

Energy: The potential development and on-line operation within the next fifteen years of solar power satellites (SPS) converting the abundant and constant solar energy in space into a form for transmission to the ground in a non-polluting manner for distribution on existing electric power grids.

Communications was the space industrial area that matured

in the 1970's and is still growing.

Manufacturing will be the space industrial thrust of the 1980's, returning the first commercial space products to earth during the coming decade.

Energy will probably be the space industry winner of

the 1990 decade and beyond.

That brings us to the chimerical, charismatic Year 2000. If we arrive in the Year 2000 with a space program that has been based on both exploration and utilization that have brought these three areas to fruition, we can look forward to space settlement and a number of activities that seem "far-out, crazy, conceptual, and Buck Rogers" today. I do not intend to

address myself to these "far-out" activities, even though I am an avid supporter of a very large number of concepts that would be considered as crazy today as a flight to the Moon was twenty-five years ago. I would like to concentrate on the next fifteen years because these years are the critical ones in space industrialization for both the government and the business communities of the United States...but for reasons quite different from those rationales that justified the space program for

the past twenty years.

Assessment:

What do we need to get from where we are to where we can be? The why will become self-evident later in this discussion.

What do we have in hand to work with in terms of hardware, technology, policies, and organizations?

In terms of hardware, the picture is encouraging if we utilize the hardware agressively in a program that will stimulate both space exploration for new knowledge and space industrialization for products, services, profits, and taxes. The NASA Space Shuttle will soon be operational. The true impact of the Space Shuttle hasn't dawned on most people yet. I keep learning something new every day, and I am not certain that I fully comprehend it even after writing books and reports about it. If we are to do what can be done in space exploration and space

industrialization during the 1980's, we must have all five Space Shuttle orbiters. The argument for building only three orbiters exhibits the sort of short-sighted "button counting" that has historically hampered the United States and its business community in the past. I shall not cause further historic embarassment to the United States Senator who, during debates on the appropriations bill of 1907, stated, "Why does the Army need another airplane? They have one!" There were also suggestions that an airplane be purchased for joint Army-Navy use and that they "take turns flying it."

We also have a number of proven, reliable, but expendable launch vehicles such as Titan III, Delta, Atlas-Centaur, and Scout. These are planned for phase-out in favor of the Space Shuttle, but they will be around and used in the 1980's.

There is Spacelab, a very important joint venture with the European community of nations. It is important because it permits experiments in both space science and space industrialization. And we need the answers that Spacelab can provide.

An Interim Upper Stage is being built as a private venture and it is absolutely necessary to extend the Space Shuttle's capability. Without an upper stage carried aloft in the orbiter payload bay, the Space Shuttle cannot place payloads in the important geosynchronous (earth-stationary) orbit.

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