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The work of these frontier pathfinders has been completed in a sense and the inner solar system is now ready for the prospectors and the entrepreneurs. The question before us is what will the role of our country be?

We have three choices: leading, following, or dropping out. As an American, I think you can guess what my preference among those three is. It's certainly not the last.

In contrast to the first decade and a half of the space age, when the United States was the acknowledged leader in space science and exploration, the situation in contrast is quite different now. There is no longer a lack of activity by other nations. If the United States is going to lead, it cannot set its own leisurely pace.

I have been saying these words for about a year now, but I must say they only have come really home to me in the last 6 months. The first time came when a delegation of Japanese industrialists came to our university to visit our NASA Center for Excellence in Separation Science.

These were industrialists from heavy industry and electronics, chemicals, those kind of things. And I asked the delegation leader why they were doing this. I said, is your intention to stimulate activity in your private sector, such as the Europeans do by placing aerospace projects in various industries. And he said no. Their interest was really space-based manufacturing. And when this gentleman stood there and told this to me, I mean, I had to believe him. I couldn't say, well, you know, you're really kidding, aren't you? So it's quite serious.

I also just lost a member of my staff to Aeritalia, which is the--one of the major space industry's--aerospace industries in Italy. And she happened to have a nice background in geology, science writing and Italian. She was a member of my direct staff--not a university faculty member. But it's clear that there's a lot going on in other countries.

And this is well recognized also in the science area. I know you are all familiar with the fact that this year saw the encounter of Comet Halley by spacecraft from countries represented by the European Space Agency, the Soviet Union, and Japan, and not the United States. And we all know that the European Space Agency has a long-range plan for its planetary exploration program that involves returning a sample from a comet.

The Soviet Union has announced a series of increasingly ambitious missions focused on Mars. And I didn't read the New York Times today so I don't know what it said. I read the wrong newspaper, I guess--the Washington Post. But from what I know, they are ultimately going to do a landing mission in the next decade that will involve a hopper on Phobos--one of the moons of Mars--and it will hop around making chemical assays there. Probably will turn up some very interesting results.

On the other hand, the most recent planetary mission launched by this country was Pioneer Venus in 1978. And while NASA has a plan for missions to continue our leadership in planetary exploration, as you all know, planetary exploration is grounded due to the lack of availability of a suitable deep-space launch vehicle--due to the cancellation of the Centaur upper stage.