Norman Augustine, the president of the world's largest aerospace company, used a quotation from Yogi Berra to describe the dilemma faced by those wishing to use space.
"When you come to a fork in the road," said the baseball great, "take it."Augustine, president of Lockheed Martin Corp., spoke Thursday during the SpaceTalk '95 conference held at Utah State University. The annual conference is hosted by Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, but since he needed to be in Washington, D.C., for important votes, former Sen. Jake Garn, R-Utah, took his place in welcoming participants.
On Friday, Bennett and several congressional colleagues spoke via satellite link and answered questions from the conference by tele-phone.
While the quotation from Berra was humorous, Augustine's point - that space exploration and exploitation are at a real crossroads - was a theme that ran through the two days of the conference.
"These are defining years for our industry," Augustine said. "It's a defining time, like 1957 was, like 1969."
The first date was when the Soviet Union launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik, spurring this country on to great achievements in space. The other year was when Americans landed on the moon, a different kind of watershed: After only a few moon landings, the entire Apollo program was scrapped.
Today, the question is whether the space program can prevent a "train wreck" that apparently has been in the works for several years as Congress cuts back on both military and civilian space programs.
The crossroads offers two possible futures, in Augustine's view. By the year 2020, he said, the country could be much more secure, with better systems in space to protect against attack and with launch vehicles so efficient that space travel could be as inexpensive as $500 a pound, so that many civilians could pay their own way on space trips.
The alternative route leads to a grim world where launching is so expensive that few scientific endeavors are undertaken in space. A few nations with nuclear capability could blackmail the world "on a grand scale." The civilian space program would be over, having ended when the last shuttle wore out.
"Really, the choice is ours. We can either pay now or pay later. That's about what it comes down to."
The crisis is that America is stalled, somewhat, in its drive to space. "We've seen the space station suffer continual near-death experiences" in Congress. It is now a quarter century since America developed a new rocket engine, he said.
What can replace the U.S.-Soviet rivalry that drove the space race in the past? Augustine answered himself: international cooperation, like the construction of the planned space station.
"Space is certainly a difficult and demanding challenge, but yes, I am an optimist; yes, I believe America has the right stuff," he concluded.
Members of a panel about the future of military space programs agreed that with a shrinking military budget, space is an important multiplier that makes American forces stronger.
Today's Navy is the smallest since 1938, said Rear Admiral Katharine Laughton, commander, Naval Space Command. "We're about the size of the 1939 Army, and by the end of the year we'll be about the 12th largest army in the world," said Gen. J.M. Garner, commander of U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command.