International Agenda for Space Exploration, Space Policy Institute, December 9, 1988

[Music] we continue now with a conference on International policies on the exploration of space the program included remarks by scientist Carl Sean the president of the planetary Society [Music] our key note speaker for the afternoon is indeed Carl San David Duncan professor of astronomy at Cornell University an active planetary scientist in addition to being a world figure with an agenda that as is the concerns that push Humanity um interesting change in Carl's proposed talk that happened in the last week and and I'm interested to see how it will affect his remarks uh the title that went out on the preliminary announcement of this program I think most of you will remember said what Mars can do for America the title that Carl is going to speak to this afternoon is somewhat broader what space can do for America Carl Sean [Applause] thank you John well I uh I changed it from uh from Mars to space when I uh realized uh that the audience would be rather different from the one at our meeting the last few days and uh I wanted to be able to uh represent at least a range of opinions uh expressed at our at our meeting and uh it is also true that uh the title says what it can do for America but as you will see I will try to broaden that Focus as well imagine yourself as a kind of extraterrestrial Observer watching the Earth over the last 4.6 billion years since its formation uh at the beginning especially you see a lot of things falling into the Earth the final stages of accretion but you see hardly anything leaving it an occasional hydrogen atom uh that's about it uh maybe a big impact sprays debris off the Earth for 4.6 billion years it's uh it's one-way traffic and then suddenly just in the last few decades in our time that situation changes suddenly there are little objects filled with instruments leaving the Earth orbiting it entering into orbit about the Sun as AR official planets and then running through the solar system little elegant space probes examining every one of the planets known to the ancients from Mercury to Saturn and Beyond Uranus and uh next August Neptune uh and not just instruments but occasionally people also mostly they hug low earth orbit cannot bear to leave the mother Planet so it would seem but 12 of them go as far as the Earth's natural satellite the moon this is an extraordinary event it is uh an historic event it is the first tentative stepping out into a vast Cosmic environment and in the long historical perspective provided we're not so foolish as to destroy ourselves I think these events will be as significant as uh when our ancestors came down from the trees about 10 million years ago and when our still more distant an ancestors crawled up on the land about uh 500 million years ago we are entering a new environment far vaster and more promising than the savanas of East Africa or the previously untenanted land so in the broad picture I think that's that's the large scale significance of space uh but on the other hand there are all sorts of shorter term issues and I would like to address some of the Practical benefits of space by practical I don't just mean uh uh making money but also issues having to do with the human Spirit the human heart and necessarily political issues first let me say that uh I endorse Lynden Johnson's assessment that military reconnaissance satellites by themselves justify the entire cost of the space program and I would say that that is true for the Soviet Union as well as for the United States reconnaissance and treaty verification satellites are essential they uh calm the hotheads and paranoids on both sides who otherwise would be making prudent worst case judgments which uh then drives the arms race and especially as we are entering into a remarkable New Era apparently of uh significant perhaps even massive arms reductions such satellites are even more important on the nonmilitary side it is clear that communication satellites for example are a a self-supporting extremely profitable extremely useful industry if you uh never mind in the United States suppose you live on an island Republic like Indonesia where there are thousands of separate item uh separate Islands the laying of Submarine cables from Island to island is vastly expensive if you have a geosynchronous communication satellite sitting above your nation you can talk from Island to Island at much less cost much higher efficiency the world is now bound up via communication satellites and this has not just a practical utility for businessmen and igrs but uh also a long-term practical consequence of binding up the world of breaking down the barriers between peoples of uh bringing us all together something extremely important in fact desperately needed the uh the ability of direct longdistance dialing to and from the Soviet Union I think is a very useful um figure of Merit about the degree of openness u in Soviet Society it was tried experimentally for a few months and some years ago pre gorbachov and uh then dropped for reasons we might speculate on I uh I think a uh very important gesture on part of the Soviet government would be to uh to open up the Soviet telephone system both ways to World Communications traffic meteorological satellites are extremely practical these days we're quite used to looking at the evening television news and seeing a uh picture from a geosynchronous satellite showing clouds moving somehow not continuously um and uh in the Practical value of of alerting farmers about uh disastrous storms and uh temperature decreases these are again extremely cost effective and there are some other things along these lines we might uh we might mention but uh I think this is a uh a comprehensive enough list on the very straightforward practical side to see that space flight is an extremely important aspect of Modern Life Beyond this there is the scientific and exploratory function of uh of the space programs of many nations if you step back and just think about it it's astonishing that uh real money has been spent by governments on astronomy from space on sending spacecraft to other worlds a lot of money has been spent on that there's no practical immediate practical benefit I will try to indicate a little later that uh the slightly longer term practical benefits are very significant but basically this was supported in order to encourage the increase of knowledge and I think uh the space fairing na Nations should be commended for that the United States the Soviet Union Isa Japan and fractionally a few others I'd like now to uh turn more specifically to the NASA program and start with what I think is the the key the fundament of the history of NASA and that is the Apollo program NASA was started uh before Apollo just a little bit before Apollo uh it was formed in part as a response to uh the successful Soviet launch of Sputnik one but the the formulation of the Apollo program was a specific respon resp to the orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin the first human to orbit the earth and this was not just a propaganda battle the orbital flight of URI gagaran indicated a very significant Soviet booster capability lift capability and must be understood in the context of the Strategic nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union the the flight of gagaran and Heron Tito and their successors in precise orbits their successful recovery clearly indicated that the Soviet Union had a capability to deliver nuclear weapons halfway across the planet uh by strategic missiles and uh this was considered to be very worrisome in the United States not just for the obvious point that the United States could be annihilated um the Soviet Union could also be annihilated at that time by a uh much larger us bomber Force but also because of the sense of diminished American self-confidence and concern about American Allies looking Eastward the Apollo program must be understood in that in that context and you can see it in President Kennedy's uh famous speech announcing the Apollo program he did not uh Advocate a uh return of a sample from Marat tranquilatus he did not Advocate determining the origin of the Moon by the end of the decade there was no science whatever in his announcement what he said is that the program would put an American on the Moon by the end of of the decade and and return him safely President Kennedy science advisor Jerome weasner had a a deal with President Kennedy that uh if the president did not describe Apollo as scientific weasner would support it and that is with a couple of exceptions what uh what happened Apollo was a political program another way to see that is uh to look at the last Apollo Mission Apollo 17 which flew I think in 1974 on Apollo 17 the second guy to climbed down the lad was the last man the last human to set foot on the moon he was also the first scientist to set foot on the moon Jack Schmidt former US senator from New Mexico as soon as a scientist set foot on the Moon it was clear that the program had gone too far and it was promptly promptly cancelled as redundant Apollo was not a scientific program I think it's very important to remember that programs of that magnitude are driven by political not scientific reasons and that is even more true today when uh there's a lot less spare cash around than there was in the early 60s nevertheless under the Apollo egis a great golden age of scientific space exploration occurred and uh I don't know if this is going to work I hate to ask for the planetary society's flag to be removed but I would like to show a few slides I also would appreciate if uh the lights could go down thanks oh maybe this going to work well what I hope to describe to you is the timing of the major missions of the US planetary program good the lights now seem to be in good shape now all we need this is a well-known mass-produced highly reliable Kodak technology now can we do anything about the uh backstage light I'm just trying to think of something to do thank you okay now I really have run out of small talk oh that's good that'll take me a minute pose an intellectual test for the speaker too uh that's terrific but uh that's not the slide I could have the one before that please ah great thank you very much um okay this does slip slightly off the edge but uh why don't we have the left hand margin and let the right hand margin fend for itself thanks okay so these are the Decades of the US Space Program 60s 7s 80s and uh here you can see in yellow the Mariner missions Marin 2 to Venus for spacecraft to orbit another planet the uh the mission which gave uh what I consider the definitive first evidence that the high radio temperature was coming from the surface of Venus and that led to confirmation that it was a massive greenhouse effect Marin four for spacecraft to uh Mars uh five to Venus six and seven to Mars nine the first spacecraft to orbit Mars 10 to Venus and to Mercury here in white are the robotic precursors to the Apollo missions the Rangers lunar orbiters and surveyors and then here are the Apollos uh apulo 11 first space first spacecraft to carry humans to another world uh through Apollo 17 in 1973 not 74 uh moving Target uh also we can see pioner 10 11 appropriately named spacecraft the first to leave the inner solar system and uh fly by Jupiter and Saturn the phenomenally successful Viking spacecraft two orbiters two Landers first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars the Voyager spacecraft which are still functioning and very well uh that have given our first given us our first close-up reconnaissance of Jupiter Saturn Uranus and shortly Neptune and their rings and their Satellite Systems uh some 40 worlds more 45 have been explored by voyagers and then Pioneers 12 and 13 to uh to Venus first American uh spacecraft to land on Venus now this is a uh spectacular record of accomplishment for a tiny fraction of the NASA budget as you'll see uh shortly uh except for the Apollo Apollos cost a lot the rest of it costs very little and uh that is a reminder to us that other things being equal uh robotic spacecraft cost tens of times less than a comparable m mission well we see this this big cluster of spacecraft here and here all done under the egis of the Apollo program and uh a few that come after Viking voyagers Pioneer 12 and 13 next slide please no before we go to the next slide I beg your pardon can we go back um okay um the arrow of time is unidirectional you probably noticed that the decade of the 1980s did not have a single multicolored triangle in it we have now finished an entire decade in which the United States has not launched a single spacecraft to the moon or the planets 10 years after this golden age of Planetary Exploration 10 years without a single spacecraft being launched this is not just due it's not primarily due to the Challenger tragedy because it began long before United States has opted out of planetary exploration here is the uh the study approval and launch dates of the three spacecraft missions that followed Apollo 17 and you can see that the approval dates for Viking and Voyager were still in the midst of the Apollo missions and Pioneer Venus just after so while we could uh argue that the uh the uh fascination with SDI has devoted some has deflected some intellectual fiscal and presidential presidential attention resources away from the civilian Space Program I think the main reason that this decline in US Planetary Exploration has occurred is because Apollo simply ceased next slide here is the uh Planetary Exploration budget in percent of federal budget and uh the highest number here is 0.25% so of course it's a tiny fraction of that as a function of time here's the big Apollo Peak and here is a subsidiary Peak due solely to Viking and it has been at this constant low level ever since and the next slide now here are in constant I can't read what year it is uh constant 1980s something dollars um as a function of fiscal year 1982 thanks and uh the total NASA budget is here in Vivid PW or whatever this is and uh the Ossa office of space science and applications budget seen here in Orange multiplied by a factor of 10 so we can do the comparison this is the Viking bump and notice how closely the space science curve tracks the total NASA funding curve so I think a uh a realistic case can be made that the grand exploratory missions go up when the total NASA budget goes up and down when the total Assa budget goes down or put another way that a grand long-term objective that involves exploration is the umbrella or egis under which these other missions can be accomplished can I have the lights please overhead lights I mean thank you so now NASA is in a rather different circumstance it has just emerged from the Challenger disaster I think it is not unfair to say that uh at least significant segments of NASA have been in a discouraged mood uh distracted uncoordinated uh in some cases incoherent American space program has been on hold the great exploratory Ventures out into the universe have uh virtually ceased and it is a very important question to ask what could be done to resuscitate NASA NASA has not had a coherent goal since the end of the Apollo program and it certainly has not had a long-term goal deriving from a coherent statement of presidential interest since the end of the Apollo program and therefore NASA has been left to design its own justification and when any any bureaucracy is left to do that it uh it does what bureaucracies do it attempts to preserve the jobs of everybody who's employed at that particular moment and uh you get a very um interesting pasti of unrelated programs I would like now to address the issue of what the American space program should do what should a coherent long-term goal embracing presidential interest be about I think I should say just a couple of words on on SDI if I don't you will see a glaring hole in my presentation needless to say what I what I am about to say about SDI as the rest of my talk represents only my own views does not represent George Washington University or the planetary Society or any other organization I uh I think the original population defense formulation of SDI is a tragic ruinously expensive mistake um and one if if actually converted into Hardware would significantly decrease the National Security of the United States uh I'm uh prepared to defend that I've done it on a number of occasions debated in three public forums with General Abramson I recognize that's not the uh the function of this of this discussion but uh just wanted you to know where I stood let's now return to the civilian space program and U and talk about what the overarching kind of goals should be I see two principal such goals they are neatly compatible they uh and they have a number of other connections as well the first one I want to talk about is something that's been very nicely described as mission to planet earth that is a study of the Earth from space from the same global perspective as these other planetary missions have done for other planets and this has a great head of steam in our in our discussions in the last two days while there were difference of opinion on a lot of issues I didn't hear a single um negative remark about that kind of goal for NASA and there's a very good reason for it and that is that as the human population has grown as our technological capabilities have uh have also grown we have amazingly come to the point where we are able to make significant changes in the global the physical environment of our planet mean globally worldwide by accident there are a number of these number of cases of these and let me just briefly mention three of them the U the increasing greenhouse effect the depletion of the ozone layer and nuclear winter I just say a word about each of them first of all because the first two can be addressed in a very important Way by such uh such a mission to planet Earth and uh secondly because I believe there's a very neat connection between the discovery of those global dangers and the exploration of other planets I want to put in the plug for that connection so I'd like to now show a few of the slides I borrow these from Professor Dutton I'd like to thank him for Lending me those slides first has to do with the greenhouse effect um wait let me let me say something generally first uh I'm I'm sorry be so hard on whoever is controlling the lights uh could I have the lights back on again if you if you imagine the Earth sitting at its distance from the Sun um with the present cloud cover therefore reflectivity or albo you can calculate what the surface temperature ought to be so much sunlight hits the Earth it's a certain distance from the Sun you know what the solar constant is you know what fraction is absorbed you can then calculate it's done in astronomy 101 all over the world uh what the surface temperature ought to be when you do that the surface temperature calculates out to be 30 cenade deges colder than it actually is and in fact the calculation if it were true would speak of an earth in which the surface temperature is far below the freezing point and we'd all be dead what's wrong with the calculation what's wrong with the calculation is the greenhouse effect the calcul neglects the fact that there is a blanket of air infrared absorbing but transparent in the visible part of the Spectrum which surrounds our planet and that infrared absorbing blanket permits the visible light through to heat up the surface but absorbs the sunlight absorbs the infrared radiation as the surface tries to radiate back to space that is called the greenhouse effect in an inept analogy with what happens in a Florest Greenhouse which isn't this at all and uh we owe Our Lives to the greenhouse effect a little greenhouse effect is a good thing on the other hand I mentioned before that the planet Venus has a uh surface temperature of some 750 Kelvin 900 fahrenheit about um and that is due to a massive carbon dioxide greenhouse effect Nobody by the way proposes that there were a bunch of bunch of beings on Venus who uh who went too much into the automotive industry and uh that's uh that's the reason uh but Venus is a very important object lesson in case anybody thought well nothing to worry about Greenhouse effects there is a very good case now if I may have the next slide and thank you so here is a set of observations made from 1950 to uh almost the present a groundbased observing station in Hawaii you can see the annual variation in carbon dioxide having to do with the seasonal taking up of CO2 by plants but the net trend is very clear and monotonic increase in the CO2 abundance and the same is true and even steeper with the abundance of methane and other greenhouse gas the increase in these molecules means that there is an increasing greenhouse effect which ought to result in an increasing average global surface temperature next slide here we can see the increase in the world's population from 1850 to the present and there been a absolutely spectacular exponential growth in the earth's population and uh the carbon dioxide oide increase parallels the industrial growth of the earth next slide here is a set of measurements of the global average surface temperature and uh this comes about not because anybody was in Earth orbit examining the whole Earth but by putting together with appropriate weighting the uh measurements from various ground stations a much less reliable method nevertheless there is a trend which seems to be quite clear according to James Hansen of NASA Gard Institute of Space Sciences in New York the decade of the 1980s has already had the three three hottest years in the last 150 and if the trends continue he says 1990 will be on global average the hottest year in the last 120,000 years uh that's something worth paying attention to uh next slide is just a uh neat graphic reminder of the mechanism of the greenhouse effect which I talked about before uh the uh infrared active gases they don't sit in a layer up there they're distributed through the troposphere visible light through they absorb infrared radiation heat the surface of the Earth so what what's a few degrees increase in temperature nobody can do reliable prognostications of the local weather uh from this cause uh but there are a number of models both the general circulation models and analogies with paleo climates in which the carbon dioxide abundance was higher and while these models cannot be believed in Regional detail something like what they say is H very probable some of the models for example predict a uh well all of them do something like a 3 to 5° Centigrade temperature increase uh by the middle of the next Century which is enough in some models to convert the American Midwest into something approaching scrub desert the uh melting of glacial and polar ice is Raising sea level so that uh uh a few feet rise can be anticipated in this period of time and if the trends continue sometime in the century after we may have the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the inundation of every coastal city on the planet this is serious stuff next slide is a schematic about the ozonosphere depletion the uh a bunch of Chemists in the 1930s are given the job of Designing a uh perfectly inert safe material to act as a refrigerant in refrigerators and for other functions they come up with them it's given the DuPont brand name of freons specifically designed to be free nobody figured that their very inertness would save them from chemistry near the surface of the Earth so that when they reach the ozone layer they would interact with a highly highly chemically reactive ozone begin depleting the ozone layer increasing the flux of ultraviolet light through the ozone layer it's uh thickness if BR to standard temperature and pressure is only a few millimeters and an increase in ultraviolet light at the surface of the Earth is uh dangerous in many different respects increasing skin cancer for for whites only by the way but there's a fair number of whites on the planet and uh but that's not nearly as serious as the effect of sublethal doses of of U highly sublethal doses of ultraviolet light compromising the immune system and the propagating consequences of killing um one- celled plants that are at the base of a vast food food pyramid at the top of which sit we lights please this is another extremely serious environmental hazard produced by human activity that we have only recently discovered overhead lights please and then the third which I just want to spend a moment on is nuclear winter the discovery 38 years after the uh invention of nuclear weapons that uh the explosion of nuclear weapons over uh and put it a different way even a small nuclear war can through the burning of cities produce a global climatic catastrophe of uh considerably more than 10° Centigrade temperature decline uh over the Northern Hemisphere and I should say that uh all the recent models of nuclear winter have converged on the same answer now it would be foolish for us us inhabitants of the earth also us Americans to ignore these very clear signs that the global environment on which we depend is in danger it's essential for us to understand the nature of the danger to figure out what we can do to amarate or prevent and beyond that to try to seek out and Def fuse those other environmental dangers that we are so far we so far have been uh too ignorant too detect there must be others that we haven't figured out yet and uh that's one of the places where the convergence between Planetary Exploration and and uh preserving the Earth comes because take a look at the uh at the greenhouse problem I've already said the value of Venus in convincing Skeptics that there really is a greenhouse uh problem uh but beyond that I'd like to call attention to the training of some of the scientists who've played key roles in uh in these discoveries the uh one of the most important uh models of the greenhouse warming is due to Jim Hansen and his colleagues at The Goddard Institute of Space Sciences in New York I've already alluded to some of their work that's already a connection but the connection goes much deeper where did Dr Hansen um develop his interest and expertise on Greenhouse effects his doctoral thesis was an attempt to disprove the greenhouse effect as the source of the high surface temperature of Venus he cut his teeth on a planetary Global Greenhouse problem and then applied it to the Earth take take the U the ozonosphere depletion problem this was done by uh Roland and Molina at uh University of California Irvine by the way this wasn't done by the Environmental Protection Agency protecting us it wasn't done by the Department of Defense defending us it was done by two Ivory Tower scientists at the University of California Irvine and is a an important reminder of why the nation should spend money on basic research uh Roland and Molina used a u a uh absolute reaction rate kinetics scheme to figure out what the result would be of the chlorofluorocarbons in the ozonosphere to do that you need to know reaction rate constants they have to be measured in various Laboratories if you look at those reaction rates you discover that a significant number of the uh reaction rates used were derive from laboratory work supported by NASA why did NASA support it not because of interest in the Earth but because there are hogen compounds in the atmosphere of Venus so by this surprising indirect route NASA played an important role in the discovery of the danger to the Earth's ozonosphere the second group that uh confirmed the role in Molina findings was a group under uh Mike mroy at Harvard they had a whole computer program set up ready to go so they could check rolling Molina as soon as they heard of it why did they have that program all set up and ready to go because they were working on the photochemistry of the atmosphere of Venus it's relevant to the Earth to study Venus by the way Mars which has no ozone uh or no significant ozone permits the full flux of ultraviolet light to reach the surface of the planet and this may very well have something to do with the fact that in the surface layers to which we have so far dug uh there is not only not a hint of life but you can't find a single organic molecule that region is being Fried by ultraviolet light and then uh the final case nuclear winter there were five of us did the first calculations of the nature and magnitude of uh of this consequence of nuclear war three of us were full-time planetary scientists two of us uh uh spent some fraction of our careers in planetary science the computer used was an AET computer is a very clear connection and the connections go much further our first interest in uh what the global climatic consequences of putting a Haze of fine particles up in the atmosphere would be came from work connected with the Marin andine Mission to Mars so there are two things that come out of this uh these remarks the first that um NASA but the government in general needs to devote a very serious program of Earth satellites to monitoring the global environment looking for items that change and uh describing Solutions and secondly that Planetary Exploration I'm talking robotic vehicles uh needs to be supported for this reason alone if we didn't have an ounce of adventuresome spirit in us it's you know didn't care about the adventure of exploration for purely practical everyday reasons it makes sense to explore the planets now I want to to go to uh my last topic which is the other aspect of what I believe the US Space Program ought to focus on there is nothing in robotic exploration of the planets in great astronomical observatories in Earth orbit in instruments in Earth orbit monitoring the health of our global environment that requires people it is much more cost effective and in some cases much more reliable to use robots than humans nevertheless NASA is strongly oriented towards uh man and woman space flight and uh as all ongoing bureaucracies it probably needs a reason to continue flying people I don't think that in itself is a justification for doing it but I think there is a reason and I think it's a very powerful reason it is the complement the obverse of the Apollo program the United States and the Soviet Union have now fully demonstrated to everybody on Earth that they are capable of obliterating each other and most of the human species as well no further demonstration is needed no politically driven Space Race makes any more sense uh especially in this recent astonishing gorbach ofan period what is needed though is for the two Nations that have booby trapped the planet with nearly 60,000 nuclear weapons to demonstrate that on a long-term basis they can work together in high technology for the benefit of the human species there are many ways in which they ought to do that but the one that has a practical BAS basis has precedent uh in the Apollo suu Mission and has the uh the very real advantage that the head of the Soviet Union has repeatedly called for it is joint us Soviet man and woman exploration of Mars and uh that's what I would like to uh spend my remaining few minutes on I believe that a long-term goal of this sort in which the two countries at first gingerly with proper concern for technology transfer and the possible unreliability of the other partner test out a new relationship in all the Preparatory space science needed for sending humans to Mars I think as confidence grows the effect would be very significant there is in the psychological literature a range of studies showing that if you well let me let me mention the classic experiment which uh was done in the 1940s uh by muzafer Sherif in which uh healthy well-adjusted uh U Adolescent and sub adolescent boys were brought to a summer camp divided into two groups the Eagles and the Rattlers I think they decided to call themselves um everything was very friendly they then started playing competitive games two sides against each other and there then got to be lots of dissension um I'd like to mention uh quote just a couple of sentences from there the tournament started in a spirit of good sportsmanship but as it progressed good feelings soon evaporated the members of each group began to call their Rivals stinkers sneaks cheaters they refused to do anything more have anything more to do with individuals in the opposing group um secret hords of green apples were piled up the Rattlers seized the eagles's flag one group deposed its leader because he was insufficiently aggressive um an attempts by the counselors to reconcile were unavailing then there was introduced a set of common problems which could only be solved collectively uh fixing the water man and others less significant in the course of dealing with common problems that affected both groups the hostilities vanished and to uh quote the summary the possibilities for achieving harm are greatly enhanced when groups are brought together to work towards common ends then favorable information about a disliked group is seen in the new light and leaders are in a position to take Bolder steps towards cooperation uh the same point was made by Sigman Freud in his famous 1939 correspondence with Albert Einstein published in the book called why War Freud says the following anything that creates emotional ties between human beings must inevitably counteract War everything that leads to important shared action creates such common feelings on them the structure of human society in good measure rests under the egis of a declared Mars goal a great deal would start falling into place in NASA man space flight long duration space flight space station big boosters staging in Earth orbit solar physics because you have to worry about uh about solar flares on the way to Mars and of course robotic exploration of the planets without such a superordinate goal I maintain that a lot of that does not make much sense and is likely to be poorly supported in a time when there are so many other urgent claims on the available federal budget now the Soviet Union is in rather good shape for sending people to Mars eventually they hold by a large Factor the long duration microgravity uh record long duration space flight uh it's likely to be a year with the current Mir crew they have the energia booster which is Apollo Saturn 5 class the United States foolishly threw it away our own Saturn fives they have a very ambitious Mars robotic program and beyond that they have the uh repeated clear endorsement by president gorbachov in favor of a joint us Soviet human Mission to Mars I think it's rather clear that eventually the Soviets will go with us or without us I also think it's clear that if the United States does not wish to join the Soviets and as I'll say in a moment uh if it does as well that other nations Europe Japan perhaps China perhaps India will join them it's not a question of uh if we don't join it won't happen it's a question of it's going to happen the human species is on the time scale of some decades going to go to Mars and uh is United States going to be involved I maintain that there is no good justification for us spending badly needed funds on a human Mission to Mars Other than the political goal of international cooperation with specific attention to improving relations on a long-term basis with the Soviet Union various Democratic candidates uh made strong appeals in this direction including to the surprise of some Jesse Jackson it is uh in resounding language in the Republican Party platform I'll quote the sentence we must commit to a man flight to Mars around the year year 2000 and to continue exploration of the Moon I know that most uh party platforms with a quarter will get you a cup of coffee um so I don't know what weight to give this but I am told that this is intended seriously by uh the Republican Party In addition there uh are a number of other Congressional uh senses of the Congress bills that will be reintroduced in the next 101st session there is the Mars Declaration of the planetary society in which a remarkably ecumenical group of American leaders um has endorsed such a goal and uh there are a number of opinion polls which show that the bulk of the American people would be in favor of such a goal uh it is therefore I claim politically feasible and it would do wonders for NASA I think it is essential that this set of missions if it comes to pass be done not just bilaterally between the United States and the Soviet Union but multilaterally involving many other nations uh who have a great deal to contribute financially in terms of of intellectual scientific ability engineering and also to play a nice moderating role between the two superpowers it would clearly be step by step we would be doing experiments in long duration space flight in shielding and staging and robotic exploration uh as I said before testing each other out finally let me say just a final word about Mars I had intended to show some slides of Mars but I've been yammering on too long so I will not um Mars is a world of Wonders it is vastly more interesting than the moon I claim both uh in scientific terms and in public uh wisdom it is is a dynamic planet with an atmosphere with seasonally changing ice caps with the possibility by no means certain of past or present life with signs of past climatic change which uh are is something we ought to understand we who are pushing and pulling with our own environment ought to understand how Mars once had running water abundant Rivers warmer temperatures and today is in a deeper Ice Age environment the surface area of Mars equals the land area of the Earth it will occupy us for a long time Mars delivers it uh it is not a boring place there are enigmatic land forms there are great volcanic eminences one of them three times the height of Mount Everest a uh remarkable polar terrain there's lots of terrific science geology meteorology seismometry possibly biology uh keep scientists happy but I stress you could do all of that with robots the reason for sending people there has to be political so in my mind's eye I see sometime in the next next century one or more great interplanetary transfer Vehicles constructed in Earth orbit daily if we want it before the eyes of the world's television cameras on the Nightly News every night Cooperative construction by many nations the completion of Journey to Mars injection into Mars orbit Landing site verification de boosting from Mars orbit sitting down on the surface of Mars the first landing on another planet by the human species there are some who are worried about uh which nation will first step on the surface of Mars my solution is you bind the ankles together of the American and Soviet commanders and have them hop out on the point 38 gravity World it'll gently settle down and uh nobody will be first imagine now what I think would be hard to beat in capturing the imagination of people all over the world a roving vehicle with Americans and Soviets and others in it wandering across the Martian landscape don't going to the Exotic terrains that we could never land in in Viking wandering down one of those ancient river valleys looking for stratification in the banks looking for the geological record trying to understand the changes in uh in the environment of that planet and uh all of that on the Nightly News every night and then finally the long journey back to Earth I maintain that that could put space exploration space activities on the front burner all over the world for a long period of time in the political context of binding up the wounds of the earth I think it would be a wonderful thing if the planet named after the God of War could help to increase the peacefulness of the inhabitants of our small and vulnerable world thank you very much thank you very much Carl we do have about uh five or 10 minutes for questions if there are any so there are microphones in the aisles if people have some questions question Jo this is a soft question in addition to supporting International cooperation at the level of going to Mars with the Soviets are there other lesser projects such as the International Space University and other initiatives that you would support that might build some bridges uh to the Soviet Union and uh another possibility is some small uh missions communication Miss for health and medicine that's been uh discussed with the Soviets do do you see some possibilities at that level we don't get the big big bucks absolutely and uh search and uh and rescue um satellites in in Earth orbit and uh activities across the board I think it is to the interest of both Nations within reasonable technology transfer constraints to uh to do as much of that as possible Soviets have uh good scientists in a lot of areas in a lot of areas they have significant space technology experience they have large budgets and it's very much in the interest of everybody in this planet for the United States and the Soviet Union to find a range of important joint activities to do Dr Sean and you didn't mention in your uh description of NASA activities over the last two and a half decades um anywhere what affect the space shuttle and the research that has had on it and I know it's a fairly controversial issue could you just mention what your opinion is of that effect and how the space shuttle may be utilized or should possibly not be utilized in further exploration and development of space thank you it's a uh as as you recognize a long and painful issue um I think U the United States made a extremely serious error civilian program more foolish than the military program in uh putting all its launch eggs in the single shuttle basket it uh means every time you want to launch something you have to send people up not just putting them at risk but making the whole launch business uh much more expensive it uh makes competition and waiting in line for uh for the next available shuttle when uh if there were non-reusable launch vehicle fleets the NASA had been using that wouldn't be be the case and of course there's the the Challenger tragedy I think uh the shuttle is an example of a uh capability without a mission without a real unique mission that could not be done otherwise I mean the usual justifications are yes it's needed in order to put people up into space but why do you want to put people up into space well we want to uh study human physiology in Earth orbit but why do you want to study human physiology in Earth orbit uh so we can have longer duration space flight by humans why do you want to have your longer duration space flight by humans and we never get a coherent answer uh the kind of answers that uh one can hear are humans have capabilities that machines don't have and so when there's an unexpected problem the humans can solve it and the robots can't and then there'll be some pointing to let's say the uh the Skylab sunscreen which required an astronaut and a screwdriver uh to first order but if uh anything like the amount of money spent on humans in orbit could be spent on artificial intelligence and uh and a new generation of robots you could have screwdriver wielding robots in in Earth orbit or teleoperator controlled uh machinery in which the human operator is on the ground and the robot is in is in Orbit to do that sort of thing I think sending people up into space started out as political the political justification then withered but it remained a constituency was very powerful in both the United States and the Soviet Union uh with a considerable inertia of its own I as far as I can see the only justification for the cost both in money and in the danger to human lives of people in space has to be political or if you wish to think of it in those terms historical but if that's going to really work we have to understand precisely what is the goal of those humans in space and I maintain that a goal like the Mars initiative uh make sense out of that otherwise redundant capability yes please uh Dr sigan the idea of a man Mission to Mars is a very exciting one it's one that uh captures our imagination but if such a project were undertaken and successfully brought to conclusion how would we avoid the crap we found ourselves in when we had the whole world excited about going to the Moon once we got there and we gathered a few samples we looked around uh public interest Fades it's going to be tremendously expensive and what's more we could get missions to the Moon pretty quickly and back uh we're talking about a substantial period of time getting to Mars and and back how do we sustain uh the energy and the funding and the resources uh for something Mar that thank you it's a very important question and I should have gotten to it in my talk um I think the fact that it takes longer to uh develop the technology and infrastructure to go to Mars is an advantage if you believe in the argument that what we want is a long-term common goal for Many Nations if it's too easy if it's too near if it's too quick then we run into the problem uh that you said if it's uh 15 to 25 years away uh then I think it has the right reach to prod this continuing collaborative multinational uh Enterprise it is sometimes said uh and I should say there there are proponents of going to the moon and and not to Mars on on those grounds um there are proponents going to the moon on the grounds that that the Russian are going to go to Mars so we better go somewhere else which uh makes no sense whatever uh in my mind uh you could just as well argue the Russians are going into space so we should stay at home uh it is sometimes argued that U well the Moon is a good stepping stone to Mars it's a good place to uh practice out Mars roving capability or or staging or things you want to do on Mars but I point out that low earth orbit and the surface of the Earth are much better and much safer ways places to uh check that out it's also sometimes objected that the uh the Mars goal is uh doesn't work because it's going to be a stunt as you sort of suggested we'll go there once or twice and then it'll end like like apala but I point out that the reason the Apollo program ended is because the United States demonstrated its extremely formidable rocket capability in fact the saturn5 booster is far in excess of uh the military boosters that uh can reliably deliver nuclear weapons halfway around the world so you reach a point where you've demonstrated you can annihilate the Other Nation and then you don't have to demonstrate that anymore but you do not reach a point where you've demonstrated that you can cooperate so you don't have to cooperate anymore uh and so I maintain that in terms of political goal Mars has continuance which Apollo did not have beyond that Mars is so vastly more interesting in a scientific and adventuresome and exploratory sense than the moon that uh uh I think we land on Mars once or twice and we will find so many fascinating things that uh Mars will help us to continue want to take one more okay I think perhaps Dr Sean you're being too modest because even with in your proposals the I think a political objective is only one objective but as we think about what we're doing to the planet here and perhaps uh in the long run irretrievably or irreversibly we really have to find other places to live for the human species and uh Mars probably isn't very habitable at least not from a practical point of view nor is any place else in the solar system system so we have to find some other solar systems and go there now that's a much longer objective and it probably is an objective of hundreds of years rather than decades conceivably it's in unachievable although I rather doubt it I I my own feeling is that it is achievable and uh that that's a long-term objective for the whole species you could call it political or social or whatever what it is a coordinated and cogent long-term objective and Mars is a conspicuously the next steep for thank you um permit me to disagree a little bit um the Earth is not a disposable Planet it's not uh IFH once we mess it up then we'll we'll go somewhere else there is as you properly point out no other habitat for the human species in the solar system the uh the excess of births over deaths on the Earth every day is about 200,000 we are not within hailing distance of the lift capability to put 200,000 people every day even in low earth orbit much less to Mars or some other some other place uh space flight is not the answer to uh solving the demographic problem and uh it's not the answer to uh to solving the environmental problem uh if I thought things were that critical I would say we should uh simply spend our money in making the earth a better place uh and I think that's a good idea in in in any case but as I've tried to indicate uh I think there are ways in which going to Mars makes the earth a better place in terms of the relationships of the various quarrelsome nation states and also observing the Earth from Earth orbit permits us to uh gain a perspective and understanding of our deteriorating environment which is essential so we all can survive and prosper on the planet thank you thank you Carl thank you let me uh let me ask our panelists to move forward as I introduce their chairman um the idea now is to spend the remaining time both communicating to you in in short form uh the kind of things we've been talking about in in our smaller workshop and then hopefully engage you in in in some give and take uh with the members of the panel uh on on um the insights and conclusions that we didn't reach that you think should be in part of a deliberation uh so can I ask all the panel to come forward as I do I this is doing things in real time uh and and this is the sort of thing those of you that are in the space business will recognize is draconic uh I have not warned any of these people but we have no overhead projector and so you can't use view graphs uh and we're not set up just the way the panel is to to show slides because you're in front of the screen uh so you got to depend on rhetoric um there's enough rhetoric in these six gentlemen I think to suffice though the chairman of the panel Bruce Mur professor of planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and vice president of the planetary Society from 1976 to 1982 Bruce was director of the jet propulsion laboratory before that an active participant before during and since an active participant in Planetary Exploration Dr Murray floor is yours thank you John and it's um a good feeling to be trying to focus on the issue of international cooperation in space and to do so in Washington DC which plays a central role although they're not the necessarily dominant role in that regard and to focus in the title of this panel is on the prospects for international cooperation the point we we spent two days talking about different facets of this in a a group that had both International and and US representatives um what we're we have here a collection of people who are going to give some little sh snapshots of parts of that discussion and perhaps give the flavor of it and discuss it in the way and we'll have some time for questions afterwards but I will do it as a introduction to this is and my own way try to summarize the what I thought were the key issues that were sort of crosscutting not saying so and so talked about this problem or that but rather what seemed to be generic what was kind of flowing out of it and aiming at add an audience concerned with International cooperation or at least International relationships and policy issues that that's been the focus this is not despite Carl's enthusiasm and mine and most of us for space in its own right the thing it brings us together is space as a part of an international set of relationships and so that's really the focus here the um a key I mean a certainly a key part from the US point of view of the Civil program in NASA is the fact that NASA started out as an instrument of national policy the Apollo program as Carl described and we all know was a key uh element in US Soviet competition that period of time and most would feel a brilliant response to a set of circumstances presented themselves when that job was completed in 1972 no subsequent National priority or objectives were established for NASA and so what's evolved in that period of time is an agency and a set of enthusiasts and set of budget support and so forth in Congress and elsewhere that has diverse goals without any stated objective by the United States government as to what it's supposed to do Lou Allen made a comment in our meeting which I thought was very very much the point he says NASA is not nearly as valuable to the government as it used to be and that's really underlies a lot of the bureaucratic and administrative problems that that emerge Challenger just exasperated these um so that's that's a problem that's got to be dealt with or we'll have mediocre outcomes the uh second uh circumstance is especially with the gorbachov change which is not only opening up and novel but a choosing space activity as an instrument of Soviet Forum policy and clearly with the establishing us Soviet collaboration as a objective in its own right and picking up Western Europe by default at least from my point of view we are not positioned well to respond to that we don't have policy guidelines and they're they're fabricated sort of on a case-by Case basis so the US responds very sluggishly and slowly and the Soviets have in an adversary sense the initiative and maintain it so that we have to decide and and do something about how do we cope there's a new thing there and whatever we decide independent of of what the value judgments about how we ought to do it we ought to do it there isn't a policy apparatus there's sort of an incremental decision-making process which is sluggish and cumbersome and makes us look uh in from the US point of view a bit foolish frankly in the international scene we don't seem to know where we're headed an exasperation is that this creates a tension between the traditional relationships we've had with our Western European allies and we were developing with with Japan and the Soviets and again we're not real clear at a at a practical level how we cope with that are we have we got a new set of friends over there are these still adversaries in a different way how do we do a a Mars mission if how does Western Europe fit in is that part of them or not so and and the people trying to do this are not do not have policy guidelines or even attitudes in their in the structure here to help make those decisions and so again we're not doing a very good job that I think is factual what we should do is a matter of of opinion third cuts a little thing is the role the Moon is a little uh is is there an international role for the moon or not if is it is it the Antarctic exp explanation or not a fourth um issue that we spent a lot of time on and Carl's touched on it too is I think everybody agrees this mission to planet Earth the use of space as well as other National Assets to understand the changes in the Earth's environment and lead into policy attitudes of what to do about it that's great we want to do it there's probably money for that and even in restricted budgets the problem again is that we're not organized properly in that case there is no agency that has that job there are agencies that have pieces of there's not a particularly there certainly in the past has not been a good mechanism for them to work together and even more difficultly this is intrinsically an international job it doesn't do any good simply to observe space the Earth from space if one can't get surface and Atmospheric ground truth or and that in turn forced you to deal with other countries even if we didn't want to on political grounds on technical grounds we would have to there is certainly no easy mechanism for that so we got two structural me weaknesses in our uh structure to deal with this and then finally looking further ahead there are some of the the speakers uh gave the common view now that both Europe and Japan's economies are growing so large that in the world that we're going into uh we're not going to be the dominant player we're going to be a major player but not the do we have to learn how to do that but more importantly we have to learn how to persuade the Japanese and the Europeans to make larger resource contributions to these Global projects and that that's a leadership job by us it's not something we can do ourselves again that that's a longer range goal it's not an an immediate task but it's something we need to be thinking about for the future well that was my list of of crosscutting issues let me introduce the panel and then turn this over to our first speaker at the end of which we'll uh permit uh some questions from the floor depending on how our time is running the um I'll just go from left to right Dr Haren Smith who's director of the McDonald Observatory uh cooperated with Dr Hans Mark who's a chancellor of University of Texas and a former head of n Deputy head of NASA and secretor of the Air Force who talked about the moon as a policy objective for the uh the United States man moon missions the um um Ro Bonet is a director of scientific programs for the European space agency has been very active in trying to get International collaboration both at common Hing and other things and has played a very important role emphasizing the role of Europe as well as the rest of of the world in this bilateral changing into multilateral space environment that we're living in important and we appreciate very much his efforts in coming here the uh next person Dr John Dutton who is the dean of Earth and mineral Sciences Pennsylvania State University is uh an advocate for mission to planet Earth he doesn't really have to Advocate everybody's kind of agreed and he uh but he did a good job of doing that and he will be our our first Speaker when we start talking um Dr John mclucas is the currently the chairman of the national advisory Council has a former Secretary of the Air Force a uh former key person at Comsat Corporation has a very broad experience in all elements of space activities and is uh been a strong advocate for the U International Space activities and then finally from Canada of the ministry of State for Science and Technology um Dr Evans is uh represents another country Raj represents an aggregation countries namely Western Europe and Isa Evans represents a a country that has worked both the United States and with Canada and and with Europe and of course is involved in our uh shuttle and space station programs as a major player so that I think that's an valuable perspective in its own right we're going to then start out with Dr Dutton on the whatever he wants to say won't be that long the priorities are set today in this instance not by the urgency of planet Earth but by the urgency of my flying schedule but uh it gives me an opportunity to say a few things about Earth Science Global change you might reflect in your own education whether or not anybody talk to you about the future of planet Earth we've talked a lot about the past it's it's a traditional part of Education Secondary School High School in uh college curricula but it's not until the last few years that we have started to be seriously concerned about the future of this planet and I think it's not that the future is in doubt the planet certainly has a future the point is that it's going to be different the world is changing it's changing before our very eyes and most importantly this planet is evolving toward conditions never before experienced in human history it's moving toward this new unfamiliar and perhaps inhospital able State because of us as a result of human activities the changes are significant they're occurring today Dr Sean did a very nice job of explaining to you the elements of the global warming that's coming from Greenhouse phenomenon carbon dioxide largely a product of the use of fossil fuels and the problems with the ozone layer I see a lot of you out there are experiencing the ozone problem you're all hiding from the ultraviolet light so what do we do well from a scientific standpoint first of all we document the extent of global change we determine the rate at which it's occurring and we determine what the local manifestations of global change are this requires a commitment to observation a commitment to maintaining records a commitment to processing those records first of all it's a commitment to using the data that is available today we have a great deal of information about the Earth but in our wisdom or perhaps our bureaucratic inefficiency we have tended to place most of that data in right only memories we could use it second of all we need to observe the state of the Earth the evolution we need to study the interaction between the atmosphere the oceans the biosphere and the ice regimes of the earth and a good way to do that is what is with what's been called mission to planet Earth mission to planet Earth involves four or more polar orbiting platforms present plans are for two of those to be built by the United States one by the European Space Agency one by Japan there's no reason that the Soviet Union or for that matter other countries could not contribute polar orbiting satellites to take the detailed snapshot of the earth that we need the other part of Mission to planet or another part of the mission to planet Earth would be geosynchronous satellites the kind that produce the weather pictures that Dr Sean mentioned they're in orbit over the equator they are looking constantly at the Earth finally there are a number of research missions uh designed to measure a variety of things on the earth we have a stream of them in the United States the European space agency has some in mind Japan is planning some some of those will be cooperative we need to continue with them given this database we need to create computer models of the evolution of the planet which are similar in spirit to the computer models that are used today to make weather forecasts that are often remarkably accurate at four to 5 days in the future with such models we can make attempt to predict what is going to happen to the statistical state of the earth some decades perhaps centuries ahead and with those predictions we can assess the various Alternatives in energy use and energy sources that we might be interested in trying this clearly is an international endeavor mission to planet Earth you could say is a mission with a crew of some four billion people it's a global problem it's a global study and it requires a global solution scientists the world over are concerned about the Earth the atmosphere the ocean the biology and the ice we need all of them and we need their talents to bring this to successful to make successful progress these scientists are coop operating now in a variety of studies uh the world climate research program the international geosphere biosphere program and of course they set precedent for much of this with the international geophysical year some 30 years ago they're talking about cooperating with the International Space year in 1992 and finally these space programs do involve all of the earth and there's no reason that they shouldn't involve and that we shouldn't take advantage of all of the space fairing Nations and finally and maybe it's not the most important reason at all is that it's going to be expensive enough that we should share costs well nothing is as powerful as an idea whose Time Has Come Global change is here the need for the peoples of the earth to respond to it is upon us we need to understand it we need to predict it and we may need to change our own behavior and I think all of this is indeed an idea whose time has come thank you Mr chairman uh next speaker will be um Haron Smith and picking up on I guess the moon Dr Mark regrets that he can't be with us today he's over at the Pentagon in fact and I feel a little bit like the the boy replacing the 900lb gorilla because not only has he had the jobs that were mentioned of being Secretary of the Air Force and sociate administrator of NASA but he's also Chancellor of my University but anyway uh Hans and I see more or less eye to eye on these issues and in fact I've had probably a good many more years to think about the particular one I'm going to stress today so maybe it isn't totally inappropriate that I have this chance to be with you Carl has asked in several have asked already in the short time we've been with you why the moon I think there's a completely different class of answer that Carl did not touch on that one of the questioners did and it goes something like this there are two possible radically different scenarios for the human race one is to stay on the earth as long as the human race shall last now that's a possible scenario I think it's a pre-copernican one in the sense that you know there was a time when the Earth was the only material body in the universe but I really believe that that in fact is not the plausible or the probable scenario assuming civilization lasts in addition to robotic exploration and I quite agree with Carl that's the way to do most of the exploration in addition to that I think there's no slightest question that the human race is going to migrate out into space now the time scale is not simple the costs are not small there will be loss of life but I mean what in human Endeavors in history have not involved high cost high cost not only in you know expenses but in human life not that I advocate that but I think that the human race is a pioneering species which is on its way ultimately perhaps the Stars although that's more difficult than any but astronomers know that's many many many centuries Downstream should it happen at all but to the rest of the solar system especially the inner part to some degree an increasing degree as time goes on I am very confident that's the case Carl's at Liberty to disagree Others May but I'm stating my basic position okay if the human race is moving out to space how does one do it the first step is to be able to get into orbit well we learned how to do that and then as Carl pointed out we destroyed it we actually wrecked the Machinery broke up the Machinery that built the Saturn Rockets I think in 1974 it's an astonishing thing but anyway the Russians have it and we are recovering it so we have ways of getting into space and even the shuttle bad as it is in some ways is not entirely a wrong-headed thing in my estimation it's the first attempt to build a vehicle that can fly into orbit and fly back now it's a primitive beginning it's sort of not even a Ford Tri motor but you know you have to start somewhere and back in the 20s and the teens we didn't have Boeing 747s either the shuttle I think is an evolutionary development that I personally do not think the country need to regret except that at the same time we threw away our auxiliary U launch capability as well which was the great mistake all right so we start out being able to get into orbit what do we do next we built a space station most of you know the Russians already have a very competent space station and we're marching along behind with we will probably have one in 996 or 7 then where do you go next now here is the Crux of the question do we then decide that we shall make the leap to Mars just like that or shall we go next to the Moon I contend we should go to the Moon next not that I disagree that Mars should be a goal immediately beyond that I absolutely firmly believe Mars should be the subsequent goal and it in turn not only for its exciting science and history but also as a further springboard for the human race ultimately to move out and develop resources of the solar system I mentioned resources of the solar system one very brief detour here what are those resources fundamentally they are three there's effectively an infinite amount of energy there in the form of solar energy to be tapped in the free space environment and there's there's more energy than can describe I've sometimes spent 20 or 30 minutes trying to get that one concept across to a class the Indescribable amount of energy that's pouring out from the Sun large amounts of which ultimately can be trapped and made use of energy is the ability to do work if you can do the work you can do almost anything else there's virtually an infinite amount of material out there now it's not always an easy forms to work with but with energy you can work with it and finally there's an awful lot of space and I think given those three things energy materials and space the development of the solar system will in fact continue and the reason for having people out there supplemented in fact heavily using robots is precisely the development of space now the Moon is the next place to go I contend on that route but uh is it only for future development in fact this point of development scarcely appeared at all in our discussions in the last two days and it's you might say my idiosyncratic point of view although one I believe in quite firmly but I think also there are reasons intrinsic why we should go to the Moon which are in several categories that Dr Mark spoke of earlier today in fact these include the uh fact that we really can learn a lot it's not absolutely essential to use the moon as a way station to Mars but I contend that in so doing we will make the Martian Expeditions a lot more feasible successful and probably not even delay them an enormous amount Beyond trying to do it in one Fel hoop also if we wish to set up really continuous shuttling to Mars which I think is the only thing that makes real sense because you have to remember that if one talks of human exploration of Mars these poor astronauts or maruts are going to land somewhere on Mars their job is to survive for a few months before they get in the spacecraft and get back they're not going to be able to Traverse hundreds or thousands of miles and explore all the wildly exotic terrain they'll examine a local area which already may be fairly well known or the site wouldn't even been picked uh by robots for that Landing ultimately when human beings can truly deeply explore Mars it's going to be an immensely exciting place but in the beginning for a long time to come it's going to be a spot check and the science will be limited but the point is we'll do more Martian work we'll have an infrastructure in place if we have the moon welldeveloped and if in particular the moon as seems now can surely be done becomes the source of the primary fuel oxygen for the really large scale uh interplanetary Voyages of the future now all of that's background the foreground that I particularly come to it from the point of view of an astronomer is what can you do on the surface of the Moon the answer is science a number of very interesting kinds of science we don't have time to go into I'll mention just the one I'm especially driven by astronomy the Moon is the place in the solar system from which to do most of the best astronomy of the future now that's another long story I've spent a whole hour of times talking this subject alone no time to go into details but briefly the moon offers you a an atmosphereless place which nevertheless is solid you can put down very lowcost telescopes large numbers of them you operate them remotely from the earth if repair is needed you have your little lunar base people in effect wander out and make the repair immediate proximity to cens power repair and so on it turns out that astronomy from the Moon should be a great deal less expensive if you don't require the astronomers to pay all the cost of setting up the lunar base now that's quite an if and it involves all these other things but once the lunar base is going astronomy should piggy back with great success with extraordinary developments especially in terms of what we call interferometry where we get not merely the present one or fraction of a second of Arc resolution on the sky that we get from the ground but 100th 1,000th even in time a millionth of a second of Arc resolution on celestial objects and telescopes of enormous size great complexity essentially free uh low temperature conditions for thermal uh IR one can go on and on with the virtues of the moon it's a great place from which to do astronomy now very finally the moon also offers a as far as space is concerned the leading place I believe for early International cooperation after we indeed get going on this absolutely essential mission to planet Earth because within reason when we get the freighter lines going to the moon and I do visualize them starting within 12 or 15 years it will be possible for Many Nations just as we do in Antarctica to set up their own little base but in collaboration with others and I sincerely believe that we'll have an international Observatory with a large number of astronomical instruments which are operated uh both individually by countries much the way the European Southern Observatory has individual telescopes from Denmark or France or what have you but all part of a complex and sharing with each other only this will be truly International and we will cut our teeth there and then we will make the trip to Mars successfully Carl I want to go too [Applause] right thank you for a very uh I think cogent and Lucid uh presentation of the idea of the value of the Moon uh Ro do you want to take over and bring us back to Earth Western Europe in fact thank you boys uh as the uh non-american uh participant in this workshop together with other colleagues uh from Canada and from Germany and France I would like to say that it was for us a great opportunity to participate in this workshop and I would like to thank the uh policy Institute and the planetary Society for having invited us and participated in this debate I was invited because I represented the European Space Agency which is as you may not know but I say it again here an agency which uh puts together the efforts in a coordinated way of 13 nations in Western Europe and we have also Canada as an associate member and as such we cooperate with the United States and with Soviet Union also but we also collaborate with other part of the world China and uh India um it is uh true also to say that there are other space agencies in Europe in France in Germany in Italy and in England it would be be honest not to say that uh some very often sometimes during this Workshop the European an and the non-americans felt a little bit left aside in these discussions uh which mostly focused on the by the dipole Soviet Union USA and uh we had some delicate moments to find our place in this discussion and in fact it's it's true that it's not an easy matter and it's true also it's fair to say that dealing with new partner we who shows um mood of openness peresta or glassos are two words which are very popular these days uh needs a learning a learning period and of course this was a key element in our discussions but it's true also to say that space exploration has ceased today to be the Affairs or only a few countries or a few organizations but is a worldwide activity and an essential motor of knowledge uh in science but not only in science also in politics and in international relationship so the question is no longer today uh whether or with whom to cooperate but rather how and uh the example of Soviet Union was a good a good uh example during these discussions because very few people didn't didn't not know how to handle this this situation we also have to uh deal with um making today lasting commitments in a world which is changing every every day if not every minute the example again of Soviet Union is a clear example of that uh two years ago who would have guessed what happens today and who knows what will happen uh in two years time so this evolution is an essential element to take into account when we deal uh with long-term commitment which probably dictates that we have to work prudently but not necessarily taking a negative approach to that but USSR is not the only place where things are moving 1992 will Mark the 500th uh anniversary of uh the uh discovery of the America by the Europeans but 1992 will be also a very important date in Europe this will be the time when the borders between uh the largest number of nations in Western Europe will be opened a real open market and this is a changing element in the world Scene It has it has been said that it creates a new superpower I hope it is the case uh it will be at least tripole but uh we also see Japan coming up at the Horizon and this is also an essential element in the world scene so these elements have to be taken into account when we deal with International cooperation on such big Ventures as a mission to uh the moon or even more Mission to Mars there are two ways to cooperate uh internationally one which is uh simple and the most coste efficient probably and also the most scientifically rewarding uh but probably the less politically interesting is a coordination of missions already existing in each Nation or in each agencies uh whereby you add a lot to the science you get out of these missions by uh putting them together in a coordinated way rather than taking the science of each individual one and adding them together individually so as I said this is a lowrisk approach scientifically rewarding but uh not necessarily the best approach politically the other one which consist in defining a common goals and going uh achieving this goal together is of course the one that we are talking about when we discuss more uh the Mars mission or even the moon mission this uh is much more risky and needs uh new means of cooperation new means of working new methods it's very difficult to accommodate this uh for example I remember in July this year we had thanks to the planetary society and uh we organized with planetary society and Isa a workshop to assess how the Europeans could participate in the m mission um we found ourselves completely uh stuck in a discussion where uh the Europeans and The Americans on the one side said well you need to go into a phase a activity and then you go into phase B and phase CD and the Russians looked and open their eyes and they didn't understand what we were talking about what is a phase a what is Phase B what is Phase CD they told us we design our mission uh at the same time we we think about it and uh these two different approaches long-term plan in a sense and realtime activity on the other side are sometimes not easy to reconcile but if we are serious about going together on these big missions and tightly coordinating or cooperating uh requir that we learn the methods of each of each others we have been as I said able to cooperate on both sides with the Americans and with the Soviets in Europe with the Soviets I would like to recall that uh we coordinated our missions to to Hales Comet two years ago and that was a beautiful success thanks to the international corporation uh the Soviets leading the way to ketal and showing exactly where the comet was so that the Europeans following a few days later could Target very precisely the nucleus of the Comet and shoot at it at 500 kilomet uh of missing distance this was also uh possible thanks to the uh crucial help of the deep space network of NASA but we also cooperate extensively with the Americans in in Europe we have many missions that have been done in cooperation the ulyses mission this Mission which goes above the plane of the orbit of the earth and Will Fly Above the poles of the sun uh we have we participate in the hble Space Telescope certainly as minor Partners but our participation is crucial to the fate of the Space Telescope since we Supply One focal plane instrument The crucial one and also the power system of the Space Telescope but we also coordinate and cooperate in the field of solar terrestrial science and we also uh just recently um accepted in our program a participation into a new Mission which is being discussed at this time in the United States a mission to explore the rings of Saturn and to land a probe on Titan the Europeans would land this Probe on the atmosphere on the atmosphere of Titan and land it on the uh surface of Titan incidentally the name of this probe is called hens from the name of the European astronomer who more than 300 years ago discovered Titan through the lens of his telescope in this changing environment uh where we see uh this new power arriving coordination is necessary we cannot do that randomly as I said we have to learn and we have to find ways of uh knowing better our partners in uh mission to planet Earth I think um myself that there is here a great potential and a great necessity to coordinate our efforts for the benefit of mankind we are really and Carl has shown us danger of not uh controlling what we are presently doing on our environment space offers a unique way to have the global view uh in order to Cooper to to control better this environment but here uh how can we think of such a cooperation without the major industrialized countries which are the main outputs of all these hazardous elements in the atmosphere the CFCs or the carbon dioxide here uh I see a great necessity to improve on the ability to exchange data especially between Soviet Union and the rest of the world where they have a lot of data and where they need the data from the West so this dual link is absolutely essential and is missing but it's a delicate matter because it needs to transfer data from that part of the world to this other part of the world and uh you need the networks or the necessary element to do that for the moon I think it is another uh Dimension there we are going to a place which we know already we have explored it we have landed on it we have put man on it we have brought uh examples of this soil and we know how rich it is in certain elements so the moon's Miss Miss is more or less an exploitation Mission we need to exploit the moon scientifically speaking it's a very challenging place to put astronomers or telescopes at least it's also a place where you can find enormous richness in the soil so it's more uh like an exploitation base that we are uh that we should think of on the m mission here I think we are in the realm of exploration still it's not because we have landed two Vikings and that was a beautiful Mission and the Russians will land a series of robots in 1994 that uh we we should uh we we should say that we know the planet we don't know the planet we have to go to many places on this planet which is a very fascinating one and here again it is impossible given the resources involved that this is not done in a coordinated way I uh think that uh my own experience our own experience in in Europe to cooperate with Soviet Union has been to go prudently but in a positive gradient and I think we are certainly encouraged by the very positive attitude of the present Soviet leaders in this approach and uh during the workshop we discussed uh and I certainly did certainly strongly endorse this concept of making a small step in this direction to study jointly just study not spending a big amount of money not changing Hardware but just today a mission to Mars together with the Soviets the Japanese the Europeans or whoever wants to join uh we have to find this uh this approach with the Europeans cooperate on the space station with the Americans the Japanese and the Canadian we also cooperate with the Soviets we have to uh accommodate this this dual activities this dipole and I think it is essential that we get together the five uh main space agencies main space five main space Powers together to work in the future I will stop here but I would like to make a suggestion to Carl San uh he had a problem to identify who would be the first one to put his foot on the on the planet Mars and he suggested that we should fasten the ankles of the American and the Soviet commandants commanders of the mission first you could take a bigger rope and maybe fasten the ankle of the European on board and if you don't find the bigger rope then asks the European to step down first they have done that 500 years ago when they discovered the new world they could do it [Applause] again thank the United States has much to learn from the experience of Europe becoming a Federation of Nations and certainly in the space experience there's a lot of directly applicable experience and ideas and I hope that we're aggressive in pursuing it uh Dr John mclucas our next speaker is now coming to the podium and we'll provide yet a different perspective on International cooperation well we were uh told that we should talk about uh what came out of our meetings of the last two days I suspect that most of us came out with the same bias as we went in with but perhaps reinforced to some extent but I I did learn some things for example I learned that Carl San does not talk only about Mars uh he used quite a large fraction of his time talking about mission to planet Earth but uh I passed out at this meeting uh two articles that I had co-authored on exploration of Mars and so none of us is following the prescribed scenario I've gotten quite a bit of criticism from my friends who say You're supposed to work mission to planet Earth you're not supposed to work Mars uh so I think it's just as well if we diversify a bit uh in Carl's talk he mentioned the Practical aspects of space as well as the political and the um Visionary and uh one of the most practical examples of course is uh communication satellites uh although and and they're not only practical but they're a big thing and they've had a a dramatic effect on the uh way we see the world see ourselves the way we communicate and in fact I I think they've had very far-reaching consequences political as well as otherwise some people say the military reconnaissance satellites are the most important um outcome of space activity I won't debate that except to say that a few people see the results of the military reconnaissance satellites and everyone has a television and therefore knows what the communication satellites do well we all know that Arthur Clark is a man who invented the geosynchronous satellite which is used for communications and we know that he also uses frequently the term a global village although he's not the only one who uses it Arthur has chosen to live in Sri Lanka which is a paradise uh at least by his definition it has a good scuba diving and a mod climate and perhaps it was the only country available at the time who was willing to pass an act of parliament to give him a tax break on all the royalties he was earning in the United States but in any case uh he chose Sri Lanka and he has become something of a a hero over there but uh Sri Lanka is a sad example of what can happen in Paradise I happen to be chairman of the Arthur Clark foundation and one of my jobs is to pick the annual speaker who will give the Arthur Clark lecture in Sri Lanka this year is the 25th anniversary of the communication satellite in synchronous orbit seemed a logical time to pick Harold Rosen and he has written a speech which he should give next week in Sri Lanka uh describing the invention of U communication satellite in the practical sense Arthur had done it on a theoretical basis uh and I have a copy of his speech unfor Ely he will not be able to give it next week because the situation in Sri Lanka has deteriorated to the point where it's considered not a smart idea to go over there and so uh this uh I I point this out for one simple reason the communication satellite has brought people together all over the world continents are now in touch with each other which cannot be in touch before at the same time it cannot solve the simple problem of a civil war created by ethnic differences in an island which is only 30 Mi across you would think you wouldn't have to go into space to solve that problem and yet it's bigger than what the satellite has been able to do well the reason I'm here uh talking I think is because I'm involved with some International activities and the first one I will mention has already been mentioned by Joe Pelton the International Space University U I think this is significant in two senses uh this University was created by three young men in their 20s they call themselves first the space generation what does that mean it means they were all born after we were engaged in space flight as they looked around for practical things to do it occurred to them that an international space University which would bring people together from many countries could play a key role in getting people to learn to work together and the those people who plan the space missions of the future would have a total International perspective so they uh persuaded some of us to act as their board and to help them uh sponsor this activity and we just completed our first successful season we had 104 students from 30 countries convened at MIT and uh everyone involved is pronounce the results a huge success I see several of our board members in the audience including our chairman Ian PR uh the first year as I say was at MIT next year we'll go to storg I think Carl also set the stage for this Mr Shah showed that people who U learn to cooperate and share joint experiences will be able to do good things together and now the next uh International activity I wanted to mention is the International Space year uh this of course is the year 1992 one of my daughters said when she heard I was working on the International Space year you know there's an interesting coincidence that's going to be the 500th anniversary of Columbus's Voyage I said it's not a coincidence anyway in 8586 uh the International Space year legislation was put on the books uh Congress the president signed off and uh a year later we were able to conduct the first uh International Space year Association conference in Hawaii under NASA sponsorship and there we had nations from all around the Pacific plus Europe uh planning together on what could be done internationally uh with regard to space exploration and we had six different workshops uh space science um Planetary Exploration space Transportation Etc but the one that that I was most interested in was the um remote sensing group and I proposed there something called International landsat I thought that landat would be a much better project if it were operated on a a basis comparable to Intel set well there was a Frenchman there named Pierre bone who said well that may be a good idea but you can't jump from uh where we are today to an international landset why don't we form a remote sensing Council and one of its agenda items would be to look into whether International landset is a good idea uh I thought that was a terrific suggestion so when we held our second conference in New Hampshire in April of this year I again talked about the uh remote sensing counil well we had another good Frenchman there euber Cen was chairman of this particular conference and uh he convened a session with the various space agencies that were represented there they were say 17 by the way and he came out at a coffee break and he said John I'm having trouble selling the idea of a counil he said um we've got to come up with another term some people say counsel canotes too much Authority I said I didn't realize it connoted any Authority at all he said well I'm having trouble with the term uh what would you think of the term forum and I said it sounds like a wonderful term uh so anyway way out of there came the safy space agency forum for the International Space year and these 17 space agency Representatives agreed that they would convene periodically and share their activities on remote sensing or um if you want to call it mission to planet Earth uh and since that time we've had two more meetings and the number 17 has grown to 22 so U I think that is uh moving Along by the way one of the people at that meeting was roal SV who many of you know and I I frequently say that if sagov didn't exist he'd have to be invented because he he's the precursor of gorby gorbachov uh he was following his own model for years before gabitov saw him in action and decided you know there is a way to operate and to win brownie points by acting more like you know Ordinary People uh but uh when I saw sag there in New Hampshire um he saw me he rushed over and he threw his arms around me and I I was sort of taking them back I mean I don't have Russians grabbing onto me every day and so I said you know if my Air Force friend see me here they'll probably lose my clearance uh anyway sagev is a an interesting character and he always has something interesting to say for example we had lunch with him here recently and he said it's not true that we don't have personal computers in the Soviet Union he said we have 50,000 and one printer anyway at this particular meeting his comment was you're trying to find a term that doesn't connote too much Authority he said I've just been made a member of the polet bureau why don't you call it the polet bureau well I think if we're going to talk about space activities at a time of budget constraints we have to show that space is a practical uh kind of activity and that means we have to draw up certain priorities uh at the same time I think we have to recognize that one of the main reasons for being in space is uh a political because uh we started the Apollo program because of political reasons uh I claim that one of the main reasons we're doing the space station on an international basis is political and people talk about how you can save money by going uh International I think that's probably true although I think it's also true that it's much more uh difficult to operate an international uh management structure than it is one based only in one country so I think there's many offsetting factors but the political factor overrides I think any of the other difficulties of a management nature if you can pull it off successfully because these people who are working together are going to develop common ties and uh reasons to cooperate more in the future I'd like to think that uh as Carl has said that the political significance of cooperation that involves the Soviet Union would transcend what we've done uh with our friends in the intern ational space station and that uh there might come a time when we would think uh just as casually about cooperating with any Nation on Earth as we do in cooperating with our friends in Canada Europe and Japan uh today uh the last uh subject I wanted to mention was uh my role as chairman of the NASA advisory Council in that role I get an opportunity to give NASA advice which they may or may not want uh but recently I went to the a meeting of the International astronautical Federation in India and this is um let's face it India is a third world country the inter International astronautical Federation typically meets in an advanced country a country with u high technology with mature space programs and so forth but India is the you might say the example of how a third world country can mount a space program which has very practical consequences at first they had an experiment which NASA helped them do to show that communication satellites could be a good educational tool now they have insights in operation not only is it good for education but it's a huge Money Maker they' found that everybody wants to put ads on their uh television programs and not only that it stimulated the new television production industry over there but anyway that's not what I'm supposedly talking about uh in the uh leadoff sessions of that conference there were several speakers talking about different things uh but one of them was Bill ballhouse talking about space exploration the other three talked about how space could be used for what I'll call down toe problems I see one of the speakers sitting there who talked about an audio broadcasting satellite uh they could take programs all around the world uh but the the three people talking about down toe problems which the third world needs space to help solve it seemed to me sort of set the tone of that whole conference so I came back composed a letter to the NASA administrator and said mission to planet Earth is the way we've got to go on a priority basis it's obvious that every third world country every Advanced country all of us need what we can get by intensive exploration of uh the Earth's parameters and this has to be our priority Mission about uh 6 months ago I found myself talking to a second grade class because I had a grandson in the class and I pulled out various models of spacecraft airplanes various gimmicks and the thing that uh surprised me about this exercise was they kept me there for two hours uh but although they learned something from me I learned a hell of a lot from them I found that the these seven-year-old kids knew a hundred times as much about space as I did at the same age and that they were ready anything you mentioned to them about what kind of activity you wanted to carry out or any International Cooperative Venture you might imagine they were ready to talk about so I think we've got to get up in step with our own kids and let me close on a small example of international cooperation uh there's several of us in the room here who had something to do with putting together a 10th anniversary celebration of the Apollo soyuz event now there was a political event and it's a good example of how you can gain political Mage mileage out of international cooperation many people thought the Apollo soyuz event was U sort of a nothing happening uh it was so small uh what really happened a handshake in space and yet uh when we brought together 600 people in the National Academy Auditorium to celebrate that event you could feel the chemistry the the uh vibrations in that room people saying you know this was a great thing why don't we do more of this and I was reminded of some of the problems we had in pulling that off uh for example U relations with the Soviets were very upset at the time of the 10th anniversary uh because of Poland Afghanistan and a lieutenant colonel had just been shot in Berlin and so forth and when we called the anas administrator and said we'd like to put on this demonstration I'm sorry this celebration of the 10th anniversary and we'd like to have you participate he said I can't go near the place and he recited all these problems that we were having with the Soviets and he said besides if we tried to cooperate on that the White House would be all over us you guys don't understand the problem well fortunately I knew someone in the White House who used to work for me he was a colonel and uh so I called him and said you know I think a call from you to the White House I'm sorry from the White House through you is all that's needed to get the NASA administrator to cooperate with us the colonel made the call we had the celebration and uh as I say 600 people had a hell of a good time celebrating International cooperation now I don't know what which event leads to which next event I think um there's no way you'll ever know but the Soviets were impressed with the fact that we were willing to take an initiative at a time when the relations were not ideal and they sent people over all the cosmonauts who' participated in that event were there with us people had their arms around each other and um the Alexi leonov and U Tom Stafford were on TV the next morning together they had their arms around each other and I remember Alexi's last words he said I would go anywhere with Tom the advantage of international cooperation I out use my [Applause] time John deserves some extra time because I neglected mention he's been the chairman of our whole conference so he deserves a lot of credit for putting this together our last speaker Dr Evans from Canada is going to give us the view from our close neighbor as uh I think both the view of the problem and perhaps a view of ourselves in that regard well thank you very much Bruce I'd like to Echo Ro's uh sentiments that uh certainly I and and the Canadian government are very pleased that we were invited to participate in this conference and we extend uh our appreciation to the organizers for having us come down now we've heard a lot in the last day and a half and today in today's uh plenary session here about some very high ideals in terms of space cooperation and in terms of international cooperation we have lots of ideas mission to planet Earth a return to the Moon and a voyage to Mars what I'd like to do in a very quick wrapup uh from from my perspective is to try and and bring us a bit down from some of these high ideals and explain or at least uh talk a wee bit about some of the Practical sides the Practical problems of in fact carrying off these very large International Cooperative programs and what I'm going to give you is a perspective from the small guy Canada is a small guy in the space business um uh to put us in perspective we spend about we're about eighth in the world in terms of our expenditures in space as a percentage of our GMP but nonetheless uh we do feel that we have contributed to our own national uh economic and social strength through the US of space and also we believe that we've been able to contribute to various programs around the world we do cooperate as Ro mentioned as a Cooperative member of the European Space Agency we have Cooperative programs with Russia with the United States of course Japan Sweden and many other countries and what I'm going to give you is a perspective from somebody who's just come from the front lines of negotiating the space station uh agreements I was a co-chairman of the Canadian side uh responsible for for our participation in the negotiation of the intergovernmental agreement and the memorandum of understanding in my view the space station agreements have forged uh a substantial new ground and have set a new Baseline for international cooperation I think we also have to appreciate how long it took to do that I can remember the first visit of James begs to Canada with the invitation to participate in space station and I believe that took place sometime in 1984 it was in 19 1988 near the end of 1988 that we eventually signed the international agreements that was four years of intense discussion negotiation uh between friends and allies and what I would like to caution about is uh at least put on the open for people to think about is when you start involving uh other nations with whom you have not had such extensive and long-term cooperation how long will it take to negotiate the agreements for a trip to Mars what did space station agreements do they negotiated they really set new ground in terms of political commitments for the first time we have a multilateral treaty between nations invol uh with respect to an international Cooperative space Venture these uh International treaties have established uh the very difficult ground rules in terms of legal cooperation the legal aspects of living and working in space together these documents have addressed the very touchy issue of Technology transfer how can we have all these nations working together to build Hardware which will exist together and with foreign Nationals from uh from many nations working on the space station using each other's equipment but primarily I believe that what space station has done is Forge a new way in which International programs will be managed and to some very large extent I believe that the way in which this program is implemented over the next uh several years the success or failure that we collectively the United States Canada Europe and Japan the success that we collectively have in making the space station management process work I think will have a significant influence on the way in which major future major international space programs are undertaken there were several lessons that we had to learn as we went through the very arduous and sometimes difficult process of negotiating these agreements one thing which is very clear is that this space agencies around the world are not in control of such major programs it is the governments of the various countries that are in control I go back a long time in the space program and I remember negotiating agreements with NASA with EA with Japan on projects which involve just the space agencies of those of those countries those are very simple agreements to negotiate because the technical people have exactly one common desire and that is to produce the best piece of Hardware to meet a common set of objectives when you move into the era of creating International treaties you bring in a whole baggage of other concerns and I think it's it's something that we all have to bear in mind is that the there has to be a very strong political government will behind uh these projects in order for them to work another thing which was alluded to today at lunch by James begs in his speech to those of us who were priv privileged enough to be there is a lesson I think that was also learned in this process and that is that the United States no longer can claim to be the leader in everything in space if we go back in the past 25 years that was clearly the case however in my mind there is a new order and as a small player I think I can say this there is a new order in the International Space Arena the European space agency has had uh more than 10 years experience in making 13 Nations at the government level cooperate in uh international space programs the European Space Agency is going to double its space budget in the next three years Japan is an emerging space Power with goals of having its own independent mans space capability we're all aware of the progress and the prowess of Russia and China and I believe that this this new playing field this More Level Playing Field is a fact of life which in the space station negotiations I think the United States had some difficulty realizing the other important thing that we realize that with this leveling of the playing field with the oncoming of strong players internationally in the space business technology transfer is a two-way street that means that no longer is a US concerned only about protecting its own technology and its transfer that the rest of the world has similar concerns and so there is now a new force a new impetus I believe on the on the international scene to ensure that we share our technology towards a common purpose and that we do so in a regime which meets the individual objectives of the various countries I think the prospects for international cooperation are better as a result of the fact that we have the space station agreements in place they are a forerunner of what will be necessary for a multilateral man mission to Mars or a multilateral exploration and visit a revisit to the Moon however I believe that space station is a turning point in terms of these International treaties and management setups and organizations and that um as we go forward we'll find that there will be more equal Partnerships and that we will find that uh in some instances the United States will take the lead in in other instances other nations will take the lead I also believe as we listen to uh my I guess what I took away from this conference is um and I apply my space station experience to uh the concept of moon missions and and Mars missions that the time is now to start to plan and work with all the international Partners towards a common goal it takes a long time to put the in place and uh if it takes four or five years for friends and allies who have had a long history of cooperation to put an agreement of this nature in place it's going to take much longer to bring in the rest of the world's countries thank [Applause] you well thank you very much for uh some very fitting words I think we we do have some time for questions what I'd suggest to Carl we got an extra seat why don't you come on up and let the provide a Target here and I guess the best way is for people who have questions simply to uh approach one of the microphones I'll try to recognize you and necessarily repeat the question go ahead no speak a little louder I don't believe that there's a great deal of skepticism that given enough money and the desire to do so that we can technologically stage a mission to Mars one of the concerns that was expressed at a recent Conference of the American astronautical society is how fit is man physiologically and psychologically to undertake a mission that will last anywhere from 18 months to 3 years depending on how it's staged that is going to take a long time to develop and demonstrate the human technology to coexist and to exist in a small environment for a long period of time an example that was made is that when the Russians come back from their very EXT extended missions in Mars excuse me in Earth orbit that they need physical assistance when they depart the spacecraft because of the condition of their physical uh state who's going to help the Mars visitors uh well let Carl respond to that well there's no question that uh that the physiological issues have to be addressed U I remind you however that uh uh Soviets have already been in Earth orbit uh for longer than some of the trip times to Mars I uh spoke to one of the Soviet cosmonauts uh who had been up for many months and he said uh when he landed he was able to walk a thousand steps along the center line on a highway sort of an interesting image of him emerging from the spacecraft doing this drunk driving test uh and so uh uh he was a physician so it was his his contention that this is not a serious problem if it is a serious problem then the alternative is to spin the spacecraft up so you get uh uh through the centrifugal pseudo force uh oneg or 38G or whatever you want you want to do but there's no question that you would not commit people to such a mission without a great deal of experience um in a simulated Mars flight and that's one of the many things that has to be uh done that's why it takes time to to do the preparation but there is no hint of uh ins superable physiological difficulties before let me just add to that that we' talked a lot about the goal the long-term goal of of human flight to Mars or the moon but especially Mars and discussing the political benefits and so forth what we have't talked about and I think it it tends to corrupt the conversation a bit is that that's not what people would be doing now that's there wouldn't no nobody's going to run in in the wildest scenario and ask for a budget to go to Mars what would the the from now the end of the century realistically By Any Nation is you got to solve at least three critical problems which can be solved within current budgets and current Technologies and current programs provide they're focused one of them is you have to know more about Mars that's robotic that's fairly straightforward second you need to know more about humans that was a question mentioned here both physiologically psychologically a lot of subtle things you do that through space as well but very carefully done and thirdly you have to know about reliable closed ecosystems which is another thing the these spacecrafts have got a lot of recycling them they've got to work for years and that's a new technology those all can be done nationally or they make very nice candidates for binational or multinational programs they don't cost very much and they they enable the human species to go sometime The Next Century to Mars they also provide the critical political information as to whether these countries are really going to be able to work together and you do it in within technically manageable and financially manageable chunks and so I want to be sure that's clear that we're that I don't think anybody's advocating making a decision to go now or to commit the kinds of funds that are required but simply to pick it as a goal and then do the enabling things for the next decade well I've used the Chairman's prerogative uh on this do you want to add to it harlon just make what make one additional comment anyone who's read stories of the Napoleonic Wars period for example knows that the incred conditions that men were crowded under decks in ships that sometimes took the better part of a year to go from anywhere to anywhere now admittedly they used the Lash to keep them in shape and maybe we should worry about that for the space program of the future but no seriously human beings are immensely adaptable under difficult conditions and these will be very selected people under highly stimulating conditions with all the resources a human race can bring to bear I have no doubt I agree with Carl that the Voyages in that sense can be made there are other hazards when you identify when you begin to speak if you wish you might identify yourself thank you Dr Murray my name is Les doorm with final frontier magazine uh I wonder if you could address uh a point which I believe Dr Evans touched on briefly something on the scale of an international Mission to Mars is a a decades long undertaking costing billions and billions of dollars and uh I wonder if uh you gentlemen have any thought on how an Endeavor of that sort can be insulated against change in the political winds right now uh of course we have the movement toward parist strika and toward glossus and the Soviet Union but there's no guarantees that that's going to continue for an indefinite period And in the United States there's no guarantees that uh a future American president will continue to support the the outlays needed for such an Endeavor so is there any way to insulate uh a joint mission to an international Mission to Mars against those changes in the political winds who wants to answer Carl again well I think it's a question of cause and effect um I think at least my my reason for supporting uh such a goal is in order to produce a political help produce a political climate in which the two Nations have this shared common purpose and uh and uh do not have uncomfortable uh changes of the sort you mentioned so I don't think it's a question of of first we uh we magically produce a global situation in which neither nation has any chance of defecting from The Cooperative relationship and then we established the joint Mission I think instead we established the joint mission in part to accomplish that improved relationship between the two the two countries and of course there's some risk of failure but uh the stakes are so high I mean I remind you that the uh the cost for each side of this mission is roughly the same as a single strategic weapon system and we have plenty of those uh it seems to me worth doing uh considering the importance of the issues at stake quite apart from the adventure and science of Mars exploration the other aspect of this which for this audience ought to be emphasized that in a program of this type you would segment it in time that's what I referring to they're near-term Milestones like 10 years but nevertheless that's the enabling Technologies and then if those Milestones are met one is prepared as a later decision to make the commitment to go ahead and go uh so you segment it in time and you also segment it functionally and we've looked there been a lot of study of Mars R sample return by a group NASA sponsored group of this and a lot of atten been given to how you do that and it turns out that if that's a Criterion of of the structure of the program that's very straightforward and so the idea of developing functionally separate and compatible synergistic units but that have Standalone capability if one of them fails or doesn't go so there you can design I think a lot can be done in program design and in system design if it's understood that's a requirement and that's part of our learning process in this new world we ain't going to be the dominant one that sets the does the system design sets the program goals and then invites our secondary allly so to speak to come join us I think that was the message that deres from the talk we've heard from our foreign participants here is that when we're no longer the big gun even with the Soviets if it's egalitarian with the Soviets or multinational involving Isa and Soviets and other countries then we're going to have to design programs differently and I think that's possible we've got to change our mindset to do it just one one point that I was trying to make is that um space station is a very large proog program um very large multi multinational program um you have to realize that space station um in essence uh Chang the direction of the uh very significantly the direction of the program certainly in Canada in Europe and Japan they've all focused on Space Station as a as a primary objective this led uh those International Partners Canada Europe and Japan to think in terms of an international treaty as a as a way of buffeting the program from the whims of annual budgetary processes and um so we have tried that approach in the space station program to try and and and use that to buffers from those those problems thank you you want to take the phone identify yourself my name is Ron Griffin with the vitro corporation uh the question I have is uh can someone briefly describe the major advantages of deploying telescopes on the moon for exploring the universe as opposed to just putting them in space like the HST just a couple minutes thank you yes I'd like to speak to that when you put a telescope in free orbit you can do it if it's in near Earth orbit you get into all kinds of complications uh let me mention a couple first of all you're whizzing around only 90 minutes you're moving at 8 km a second with respect to the atmosphere you're in encountering ionized oxygen at a ferocious rate the Earth fills half your field of view you can get a dark sky exposure for maybe 40 minutes at a time it takes an hour or two to move the telescope from one orientation to another in extreme motion somewhat less for closer ones you have to balance the thing to the order of a thousandth of a second of Arc against gimbals incredibly difficult expensive it is this is the reason why Space Telescope costs 1.5 billion dollar even though it's smaller than uh my relatively modest 107in telescope at McDonald now uh that's tough we could put much bigger telescopes on the moon for much less money if we only had to pay the transportation cost to the moon and had lightweighted uh units there that's one level of argument they really will be cheaper provided the cost of building the lunar base is amortized against the human move into space and is not charged against astronomy and I agree the astronomy budget couldn't carry it now that's only uh the most obvious example let me mention another you'd like to do what we call interferometry in space in order to get high angular resolution in principle you can do that by putting remotely floating uh vehicles in space and probably some of those problems are soluble but it's all going to be expensive to maintain baselines orientations uh constant naming of the telescopes The Source you want to study and so on in principle it can be done but staggeringly expensive on the moon if you have the lunar base you go out and plunk down your little telescopes I'll mention just one more and then I'll subside but again this this is a long story I have a long several long articles on this uh let me mention one more uh if you wish to explore new domains of frequency that have never been studied before you normally find exciting new astronomical results there is a domain from roughly a few hundred kilohertz in frequency up to about 10 megahertz that is essentially totally unknown it's a big the biggest spectral window we know essentially nothing about it would be almost impossible to build an effective system to observe this in space you can't do it from the ground because the Earth ionosphere blocks it on the surface of the Moon it would suffice to lay out little elements really about the size of a pencil uh at intervals of hundreds of meters Each of which has a little chip solar battery a little transmitter to send signals to a common computer for an incredibly low cost you build an array of tens of kilometers in size on the moon and get an extraordinarily effective radio telescope of a kind that could be built nowhere else in the universe these are just a very few points again a lucid answer and I can assure you there's a lot more where that came from so what uh I'd like to do because of our time situation is uh acknowledge the two questioners are at the microphone and that's where we're going to cut off and hope that we the panelist responses can be fairly brief too World space report and my question is uh is there any ongoing programs uh or even exploratory meetings on an international scale or even national scale and if there isn't the feasibility of exploring new means of propulsion in space beyond chemical propulsion so we can take up greater masses at greater efficiency and get greater distances in quicker time who volunteers harlon you want to take I think that's yours your JPL man not recently uh the as far as I know we we did a little bit of work or there was a little bit of agitation this back in the about 1980 uh and it turned up matter anti- matter uh and it turned up uh exotic sails with giant lasers and so forth those were the two things the outcome of those have been the giant sales became the basis of a science fiction novel by uh Bob forward and and and Technical papers with Freeman Dyson um and the antimatter is something that you watch because they take one antimatter particle at a time in CERN and they try to keep it in a magnetic bottle and they put another one in and then they put another one and if you want extrap in that way it's a long in the future the answer is that there as far as I know there is nothing in the time scale we're talking about including going to Mars and I by the way I include any kind of nuclear rockets in that regard that competes with existing chemical systems and there's certainly no constituency to develop them beyond that you know science goes on technology goes on it's it's hard to know at what point some you know radical change might take place but there's certainly nothing that one can foresee or that I foresee in that time scale specifically one uh one area wasting was uh evidently new material processing or developments has allowed the thinking of solar electric propulsion and ion generation just in the last couple of years uh Ted Taylor who was behind the Orion Project is very enthusiastic about this potential I think the problem is that you can't show that you can't the mission they proposed to do you can also do chemically the chemicals exist and that therefore there's not an incentive to to launch a large development program let me um give our last I'm sorry we got to sign off the last speaker here go ahead you're oh yeah uh the name is Kevin Owens I'm just a member of the planetary society and one of the issues that has me puzzled is we've discussed a lot about International cooperation and the cost the engineering and the systems to get to Mars and the moon but there's little discussion of after we've gone there and come back is what do we do next you know like uh is there been thinking about homesteading these places or we find out what's there and then just do like we did with the Moon and say well we found out what there was to find out um I think the easiest answer is a national commission space report which is widely available deals with that hope and aspiration and also some of the difficulties in rather a great extent uh and Beyond there it's kind of voting your conscience about the future I think that there but I think that report really is the the best uh response to that so uh with that in mind I'd like to turn the meeting back to the chairman here and uh let you take over here thank you Bruce thank you rest of the panel God we're right on schedule it's remarkable um we're done I think it's been a uh I hope you found a useful afternoon I think the the retention of a significant portion of the audience suggests that that you found in our public discussions the same kind of intellectual excitement and challenge that we've been finding for the past day and a half I thank you all and uh who knows when the next one of these things will uh happen here at the University but you'll certainly know about it thank you [Applause] [Music] you've been watching a conference on space exploration sponsored by George Washington University be sure to join us later tonight for a live viewer calling program on the recent Soviet troop reduction proposals with Ambassador Edward rowny coming up at 6:30 p.m. eastern time 3:30 p.m. Pacific live on cpan and coming up in a moment a look at the Congressional budget process with Rudolph Penner of the urban Institute [Music]

Channel: Space Policy and Politics

Views: 58,465

Keywords: Carl Sagan, Space Policy Institute, John Logsdon, Bruce Murray, The Planetary Society, George Washington University

Id: CffnY7NS5ac

Length: 161min 6sec (9666 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2017