THE SPACE PROGRAM

To the Editors of The Crimson:

While we thank you for your interest in the HCSE, and we feel that the general tone of your article March 12 (p. 4) was fair, you ascribed some statements to us which might be very upsetting to people knowledgeable about the space program. So we ask if you might print this letter in correction.

First of all, we definitely do not advocate a space program of $10 billion government spending per year. We do advocate the development of a fully re-usable space shuttle. According to figures from NASA and. OMB, reprinted in many issues of Science News, the total development cost of such a shuttle would run to $12-14 billion total over a period of seven years; this would amount to $2 billion per year, less than two-thirds of the present NASA budget. Our point is that we can preserve our hope for future economic growth for less than one per cent of the GNP. We do not oppose developing this in "two generations", if need be, but we believe that Nixon's twice-reduced shuttle will not amount to an early version of a true shuttle, and we believe that even it has been underfunded. A true "first generation" shuttle would cost $5.5 billion to develop, and would use only hydrogen as fuel; Nixon's version uses solid fuel, a dead-end idea, and would cost $5.15 billion to develop, if it isn't phased out, too, as it almost was this year.

Second, we feel that global thermal pollution, not crowding, will probably impose the first total limit to economic growth on earth. Many people estimate that the thermal pollution required to bring earth's present population up to America's present standard of living, without depending on nonrenewable resources, will be enough to melt the polar icecaps and drown most of the people and almost all of the farms in the world. (Jay Forrester's group, for example, recommends that underdeveloped countries slow down their growth now, because it will be impossible on earth to close the gap between them and us.) This form of pollution if simply not meaningful in space.

Thir, we wouldn't call NASA itself "badly mismanaged." NASA has a lot of good systems engineers, who really want to do their part to bring about a space economy. But when it comes to communicating the role of the space program, in a larger context, or in analyzing its economic impact, both NASA and OMB have been negligent or worse.

Fourth -- a minor point: the "high-strength" materials we had in mind were construction materials, for machinery and other applications, not clothing. (Though for all we know, special-purpose clothing might be manufactured profitably in space. Some day, anyway.) The Handbood of Chemistry and Physics shows that crystalline A1203 (sometimes called sapphire, ruby, etc.), grown in space, has more than ten times the strength of the usual earth materials; and that is only the tip of the iceberg, in that category. Also, we wanted to include on the list the possibility of manufacturing hemophilia factor, at a cost on the order of 1/10 of the present $20,000 per person-year--with huge benefits for 1,000,000 American hemophiliacs who cannot yet afford to lead normal lives. Just as people normally underestimate the effects of bad expontential growth in pollution on earth, we believe that they underestimate the effects of the good expotential growth that can result from space manufacturing.

Fifth, we have gotten in touch with various political people, but it has not been in the nature of "offering our advice." We have received a number of offers of help, in fact. One of our primary goals is to put together a longish booklet, giving the facts about space and its historical importance -- something we can't do in a 1-page handout.

So: thank you again for your interest. Paul J. Werbos   Gen. Sec'y, HCSE