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NASA'S LONG-RANGE GOALS

WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 1987

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY, SUBCOMMITTEE ON SPACE SCIENCE AND APPLICATIONS, Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 11.08 a.m., in room 2325, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Bill Nelson (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Mr. NELSON.  Good morning.

We are going to begin a series of hearings on NASA's long-range goals, and by the interest exhibited here today with your presence, it's obviously a subject that we all need to tend to.

We expect to be spending several months a great deal of time looking at this issue over the next several months because now is the time of a critical decision-making juncture for America's space program.

Since the end of the Apollo program, we have needed some major goal, a goal that would lead to technological advances, that would provide new scientific and intellectual stimulation, a goal that would clearly reassert our international leadership.  Over the last decade, the budget for the space effort has fallen to less than half what it was in the mid-1960s, and our science and exploration program now are at a bare subsistence level.  So the space program that once united the dreamers with the doers has made way to the world of the budgeteers.

So now, as we rebuild from the Challenger accident, we are in greater need than ever before to focus on the future.  I know that the men and women who have dedicated their careers to our space program have not lost their sense of purpose.  That is obvious, day in and out, as we rebuild.  These folks stand ready to be our greatest resource if the administration, specifically the President, and the Congress can provide the leadership necessary to get back on track.

Now, on this note, let me pause to express my great disappointment at the administration for it seeing fit to delay the release of NASA's response to the Paine Commission, the National Commission on Space.  In 1985, this committee, through the NASA authorization bill, set up the National Commission on Space.  That Commission, headed by a former NASA Administrator, Dr. Tom Paine, rendered an extraordinarily visionary report.  In part, that report got lost by virtue of the timing that we had the terrible tragedy that we all suffered.  But this committee has constantly sought - in fact, through law, through the NASA authorization bill - to get NASA to come forth with a response to the National Commission

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