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There are several questions that I had, and one had to do with the exploration of becoming more aware and familiar with the Earth. You talked about three agencies working together. You said NASA, the Nation Science Foundation, and NOAA.

How do you propose this come about, or have you looked beneath to see how they could work together and what the functions would be?

Dr. RIDE. That's a very good question. I think I may be about three weeks out of date on the answer to that, because I believe that's beginning to happen right now. I believe that there is a committee that has been set up that involves NASA, NOAA, NSF, and possibly others. I'm not the expert on this right now. In fact, it literally is happening as we speak. So I would be happy to get you more information that.

But I believe that the concept behind mission to plant Earth has actually got quite a bit of momentum behind it. We didn't initiate this idea by any means. There's been a comprehensive report out of the NASA Advisory Council that you may be familiar with that was submitted last summer-it's call the Bretherton Report-that details a lot of this and makes as one of its recommendations that establishment of an interagency council for the investigation of this sort of an initiative. To be honest, I don't know whether it was as a result of that recommendation or some other recommendation or just general interest from the international science community. But I believe that is taking place.

I would be happy to get the detailed information on that for you.

Mrs. MORELLA. It just seems as though the more we can get the agencies to work together, the more we're going to accomplish the ultimate goal.

Also, you stressed a great deal in one of the initiatives the concept of using the Moon, the lunar outpost, and therefore putting off the Mars exploration and expedition which is so dear to the heart of the Sagan society. We had originally thought we could get something going in 1990 and then it was 1992, in terms of the cooperative Mars expedition. What, in effect you are saying is we would have to postpone it in terms of using the lunar outpost.

Do you want to comment on that?

Dr. RIDE. One thing that we-actually, two things that we didn't look into that bear a lot of study is exactly how the lunar initiative and a Mars initiative would fit into the same overall strategy. We took four very distinct initiatives and we developed their scenarios and we looked at them individually. The next step is to say okay, we've got four good initiatives here, but maybe they're not-none of them is strategy. What would our strategy be?

A possible strategy for human exploration is to go straight to Mars. Another possible strategy for human exploration is to vault towards the Moon and then to Mars. That one we didn't look into at all.

And I might-this may be a good place to make the point that one of the early recommendations of this study, a recommendation which we made to Dr. Fletcher, which he adopted, was the establishment of what we are calling an Office of Exploration. Because as we were going through this, we discovered that there really was no home at all in NASA for studies of a lunar initiative or a Mars initiative