Presidential Panel Chief Voices Bold Plan ‘to Carry America Into the 21st Century’ : Charting the Future in Space

The chairman of a presidential commission appointed to chart the nation’s future in space outlined a bold vision Thursday that could include space stations orbiting the Earth, the moon and Mars, and even a shuttle service to connect those stations.

Admitting that the ideas the National Commission on Space may recommend are “very bold,” Thomas Paine said his group will not disappoint those who want a blueprint for the future that will guarantee the continued pre-eminence of the U.S. space program.

“I’m going to try to put in some very bold programs indeed,” Paine told about 500 people attending an annual luncheon hosted by the Los Angeles section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in conjunction with Space Week. “They will be very challenging to the people involved.”

Paine’s commission, mandated by Congress and appointed by President Reagan, was charged by the President with devising “an aggressive civilian space agenda to carry America into the 21st Century.” Included among the 13 members of the commission are Neil A. Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon; Kathryn D. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, and Charles E. (Chuck) Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier.

Paine, who headed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration when Americans landed on the moon 16 years ago, said his commission’s recommendations are not scheduled to be presented to the President until early next year, but he outlined “the way we are tending.” The audience included many of the key figures in Southern California’s aerospace industry.

One key to the future, as Paine sees it, will be the development of a new generation of heavy launch vehicles that can carry massive payloads into orbit far cheaper than is done today.

“We have got to get the cost of taking stuff up substantially below the shuttle era,” Paine said.

The new, presumably unmanned vehicles would be part of “the development of a space infrastructure, which is the highest priority,” Paine said.

That infrastructure should include space stations that would be constructed in orbit above the Earth and then moved out to other positions in the solar system, including “one in lunar orbit and another in Mars orbit.”

Orbiting space stations would be virtually free of the gravitational pull of their host bodies, thus permitting spaceships to visit and depart the stations with minimal fuel expenditures.

Paine surprised some in the audience with the suggestion that his commission may recommend that long-range plans include space stations that would travel in much larger orbits, circling both Mars and the Earth, for example. Such stations would serve as “sort of a Mars-Earth shuttle system,” Paine said.

Launch vehicles from Earth could carry supplies bound for Mars up to the “Mars-Earth shuttle,” transfer materials to it, and then the station would carry the cargo on to the Red Planet.

Testing for Boldness

Paine said that he met last week with George Keyworth, the President’s science adviser, and presented some of these ideas to see if they were “too bold.” He said he came away with the feeling that nothing could be too bold, paving the way for the commission to push for an extremely aggressive space program through the next half-century.

Although the commission’s responsibility is to submit a proposal for the next 20 years, Paine said an overall look at the nation’s space future required that time frame to be extended to 50 years. That longer view, he suggested, would make it possible to develop the structure needed to carry the program well into the next century.

Paine headed NASA during the first seven Apollo expeditions, including the lunar landing, which Space Week commemorates. He left NASA in 1970 and later became president of Northrop Corp. He is now a private consultant, but the work of the commission has turned out to be a full-time responsibility.