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Although it's too bad there are hydrogen leaks and it's too bad they can't find them, the message that I take away from that is the NASA has learned a lesson.  There is no such thing as an okay hydrogen leak.  Hydrogen is bad stuff.  It's explosive, and it can ruin your whole day if you've got it down there near the main engines.  So NASA is taking what I think is really the appropriate approach to this, which is to say, "Look, we're just not going to launch these things until we find the hydrogen leaks.  We don't care what it does to our schedule.  We don't care what the media is printing about it."  I think that is a better approach than the approach they took before the Challenger accident.

They've got good new today though, with the successful launching of Discovery.  There were no hydrogen leaks.  There were no problems.  And we hope that there will be no problems throughout the rest of the flight.  I've told you about Ulysses, which they hope to launch on this flight.

I wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking not so much about the future of the Shuttle Program, but more about the future of what NASA hopes will be and thinks will be a major program over the next two decades.  That is NASA's Mission to Planet Earth.

Mission to Planet Earth is just one part of a multi-agency national program to study the global environment of the Earth.  People have realized over the last five or 10 years that the Earth is a very complex system.  It's a very synergistic system.  The atmospheres, oceans and biological components of the biosphere, and even the continents' volcanoes, all interact with each other.  You can't study one without studying all of the others.

NASA and several other government agencies have developed concerted programs to use the capabilities that we've developed in the Space Program—to look back at earth and get the global perspective that you really need to study the earth.  And to study not only the effects of all these interacting systems, but also the effects that we have on these systems.

Mission to Planet Earth will take a pretty big bite out of NASA's budget over the next decade.  It's a program that's very well received in Congress right now so it's got a better chance of success over the next several years than some other NASA programs.  Although there's a little bit of scientific quibbling:  Should you put all of these things on one platform or many platforms?  There is essentially no disagreement that this is really an important thing to do.  Putting the sensors up in orbit and studying all of the various aspects of the planet is really something that should be a high priority for the country.

So that's something that NASA is aiming toward over the next 10 to 20 years.  It will be a program that has a lot of emphasis and a lot of importance and hopefully a good, clear direction for NASA for many years to come.

I think with that I'd like to stop talking.  I know that if I talk too long, I'm preempting cake and ice cream, which is always dangerous.  So with that, I'd like to see if anyone has any questions.  I'd be happy to talk about anything.


Question:  What is your role at UCSD?

I have two roles there:  One of them is a professor in the Physics Department.  Last year, I taught Freshman Electricity and Magnetism.  I'm probably going to teach that again this year.  I also do physics

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Transcription Notes:
Smithsonian staff, this has double spacing between sentences, as was originally done, is this preferable?