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throw away three. We decided to take this approach to get a good clear definition of four different initiatives that would help the discussion and bring the discussion to your committee, to the public, so that we can all start deciding where we want the civil space program to be going.

I guess the first ground rule we adopted was that these are bold, ambitious initiatives. We want to create bold, ambitious initiatives. These would be done on top of the existing program. There is no intent to replace any existing programs. For example, space telescope isn't included in the initiatives. There was no judgement made whether any of these was better or worse than space telescope. We took the current NASA plans as given and said what can we do on top of these.

The approach that we took to defining these initiatives was--well, it's actually the approach that I took. I decided that I know an awful lot about the Space Shuttle and more than I really want to know about solid rocket joints and O-rings, but I'm not an expert on mission to Earth, on planetary exploration, on lunar geoscience, or on Mars, and I didn't have enough time in ten months to become an expert in any one of those. So I did not set myself up as the advocate for any of these programs. 

What we did was identify four initiatives--mission to planet Earth, robotic exploration of the solar system, an outpost on the Moon, and human exploration of Mars--and identify a task group and an advocate for each. The task group developed the technical aspects of the scenario, the advocate integrated all those, presented them to us and presented them also to NASA senior management, and essentially did all the speaking for those initiatives. We really sat back and listened. So although we were a part of the development of each initiative, we were not advocating any one of them and, in fact, thought it was much more appropriate for the line organizations within NASA, the real experts, to be the ones developing the initiatives and promoting the initiatives.

That may be my first disclaimer up here because, although I intend to describe all the initiatives, you may ask questions that get a little bit beyond my detailed knowledge--and we don't have any of the advocates here--so I would refer you to perhaps a future hearing with them if you're interested. But I think that I can address most of the questions that you'll be asking on the initiatives. 

Each of these was developed between the period of about January and April. We used a workshop environment. We gathered the necessary expertise from inside NASA and, if necessary, outside NASA to put together these scenarios. I think what we have come up with are really four very solid initiative proposals. 

Again, I need to emphasize that we really didn't want to set up a competition, and we still don't want to set up a competition, and I would prefer it not be viewed in that light. In fact, all of these programs are good programs and they're all things that NASA ought to be doing, and they're all things that I assume, given enough time, NASA will do.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Ride follows:]