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basis, that whatever we encounter along the way we kind of almost do by accident. We had the one thing that seemed to energize people to go to the Moon. I mean, from time immemorial, people looked up at the Moon and they thought that was interesting and wanted to go to the Moon, but after that we had nothing that really seemed to energize the American public or appeal to the human spirit.

I just can't help but feel that we, as a committee, and we as a society, need to define what our interest in space is; what is our long-term goals? Is it to energize-is it to go to space, is it to colonize space, is it to go to the solar system, is it to go to the stars, or rather is it to focus more upon the quest for knowledge? Why is it important? Is it just to give us technological spinoffs that we power our society with? Why is it important?

I think that what you're talking about here is very important. Essentially, it strikes me that you're proposing getting comfortable with outer space stage, and that is the first thing that you're trying to get us to do. Let us get some time in space and, in essence, get comfortable with space.

Doctor, I suppose the real essence of my query here today is how far in the future do you think we should be looking and how much, and I know no one person can delineate goals. But how much should we be trying to delineate some ultimate-not ultimate, but something far enough off that will give us some sort of sense of perspective?

Dr. RIDE. First of all, let me agree with you wholeheartedly, that what we need in this country is an understanding of what our goals are and what our strategy for the space program is. And I also agree with you, that I don't believe we have that understanding right now.

The space shuttle and the space station shouldn't be goals in themselves. They should be the means for achieving our goals. The space shuttle is a way to get to orbit; it's what we do in orbit that's important. The space station is a place to live and work in orbit, but it's what we're doing while we're living and working there that's important. And those are the goals that we need to understand. We need to understand what we're using our space shuttle for and what we'll be using our space station for.

Now, your question of how far in the future should we be looking, I guess I don't know the answer to that. But just looking at it from a practical point of view, if we don't have a good understanding of what we want to be doing between 2000 and 2010, then we just don't know how to make good, rational, thoughtful decisions today on how we should be developing our technology and our space station.

In fact, the space station may be the best example. The space station is a facility that we'll start building in the mid-1990s. But we've just gone through quite a debate on what the space station should ultimately look like. That depends on what we want to do with it, and I think we've just come to that realization.

What we've got now is a pretty good approach, I think, where we've got a phase one space station with the understanding that we will evolve the space station based on what we want to do with it. And we need to figure out what we want to do with it. If we