 In 1957, the geopolitical landscape changed forever, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. By today's standard, this primitive orbiting satellite is certainly nothing exciting, but in 1957, its impact was psychologically devastating. The launch of Sputnik made outer space the new high ground of the Cold War. The value of space exploration was now obvious. The space race was on. For more than 10 years, the space race thrilled and inspired people all around the world with new and more spectacular accomplishments. Then, on July 20, 1969, the whole world stopped to watch as the United States, with the crew of Apollo 11, left the first human footprints on the moon. The eagle had landed, and in one sense, the space race was over. Without the competition and fear generated by the Cold War, our reasons to explore space have changed, and our sense of purpose is much less clear. But the truth is, humans use space more now than ever before. Today, many benefits of space exploration, such as weather, communication, and navigation satellites, are routinely taken for granted. Spectacular feats go unnoticed, and the valuable products of orbital research are rarely associated with their origins. According to Earth applications of space exploration, save people in distress at sea, assess the condition of crops, guide us to remote locations around the globe, and allow us to communicate with each other over vast distances. Unfortunately, without a threat to spur us on, our sense of urgency to explore space has significantly diminished. But the future of space exploration still keeps us looking up, and the value and potential of our work in space is far greater today than ever before imagined. We need only consider the possibilities. I'm Joanne Irene Gabrinowitz, and I'm a professor of space studies here at the University of North Dakota, and tonight we are here to discuss what the possibilities of space are. Joining me here tonight in Clifford Hall Auditorium are a number of North Dakotans and three North Dakotans in particular who have chosen to share their views with us on this subject tonight. To my left is Lani Falati, a farmer from Matic and President of Agra Images, Dr. Linda Gournault, a physician from Newtown, and Rick Heave, former astronaut and native of Jamestown. Six North Dakota towns, Grand Forks, Hazen, Jamestown, Minot, Mott, and Newtown will all be participating in this community conversation. Tonight's topics are going to be the economic, cultural, and scientific value of space exploration. Space has always been very interesting to me, and ever since I first saw them first moonwalk I've always wanted to be an astronaut like Rick, but I guess I never will be. But the next closest thing is to be able to see things from space. We developed a new company called Agra Images that is taking the satellite technology and bringing it into agriculture in a form that is usable for the average farmer. We're able to analyze the patterns within a field and be able to take them and put them into a variable rate application spreader and analyze the vegetation and change the fertilizer on the go. We're able to revolutionize agriculture in a form that we never knew would ever happen. We're all part of this life, and we're also related to all man, all mankind and womankind on the earth. And in a way it's like, yeah, I could understand that, you know, that we're related and sometimes some people don't see that, but I think once you get up into space and you look back down onto the earth, you realize that you belong, that's home and all the people there are family. Tonight I'm going to talk mostly about the third of my space shuttle flights. In a lot of ways it's the least, it was certainly the least glamorous space shuttle mission that I was part of because it was a space lab mission. Although my other missions were certainly visually more exciting, I can pretty well guarantee that when you or I on down the road 10 years from now, 15 years from now, the things that will affect your life in ways that you don't even know about, most of those discoveries will have been made in laboratories like this. Just as an example, one of the 80 experiments we flew, we had a furnace in which we had a bunch of different samples that could be injected into the furnace held in place with magnetic fields so they wouldn't go floating off and get about. And then another magnetic field or electric field was applied to melt those samples. Well, the big deal about that was that this particular metal, they believe that if they can get this special structure would be slipperier than Teflon and yet a metal. Well, I think anybody in here can immediately draw some rapid conclusions. If you could produce this commercially, every motor in the world within a decade would have to take this stuff into account. Well, now we'd like to invite all of you in all of the towns all over North Dakota to participate in this and use our comments as a springboard. I'm Solomon Mandel, a farmer 40 miles from Grand Forks and I just want to thank all the explorers for everything that they've done for our farming. We run center pivot irrigation, the resolver that tells me what degree my irrigator is, is a direct descendant from NASA. The computer that feeds my chickens that instead of running 108 motors, you run 10 motors, 10 minutes at a time, you're still feeding the 60,000 chickens without causing a brownout in Grand Forks. The energy savings that we've seen already, the water savings that we've seen with irrigation, we've cut our water use in half. This imaging, I can see where we'd be able to cut it, another 70 to 80% in the next four or five years, so the technology is there already. Engineer came up to visit his brother-in-law in Nebraska in the summer. And his brother-in-law said, let's go out there cornfield and check the irrigators. They went out and he said, my mechanical water meters broke down. And the engineer said, that's nothing. Everything we do at NASA, we check the flow. He said, I'll send you one of them. It's a magnetic thing that runs and there are no moving parts. And today, all our water meters are direct descended from NASA. And the potential is so great, it's just incredible. At this time in Southwest North Dakota, there's an emerging strategy for small town economic development that involves identifying relocatable companies, buying them, moving their operations to small towns in North Dakota. And in this area, our preference would be to buy a small, high-tech, space-related type company or manufacturing company. Can you UND space or NASA help in the following area? Identify companies for sale that can be relocated, provide technical expertise to assist relocating, help evaluate a relocation candidate's products or services. And as an alternative, can you suggest ideas for startups derived from some spin-offs in the aerospace industry? Really, NASA probably can't do that for you because from an economic point of view, there's no way you could argue that that's part of NASA's charter, but it seems to be clearly part of what your state delegation, your congressional bodies, that is part of what they should be doing. I've always lived in Maddox, North Dakota, a small town of 600 people. And when I really located the company there, they asked me, local people, why do you want to be here in Maddox? I said, why not? I said, we're connected everywhere. I can hook on to the internet and be anywhere in the world. Probably the most dramatic thing that space technology is doing right now is enabling people to engage in commercial activities that, at least for the last few hundred years, have primarily been aggregated in large urban areas. I mean, you can operate a business out of your home no matter where it is now. You have modem facts, communications, pagers, whatever you need. Dr. Gornel, how do you think we might encourage not only cultural diversity but discussion of cultural questions, as you alluded to, to be a part of future space exploration and the space program in general? And what is the value of including such questions and diversity? I don't know, I've heard somewhere before that for every action, there's a reaction. And that's going to happen with whatever they're doing in space. And I think it's so important to consider all the cultures of the world because we're all in this together. But I think everyone should be allowed to have a voice to contribute to what's happening to them because it's their future and their children's future. I feel that to some extent the planetary research programs in NASA have been sacrificed to keep the space station afloat and it strikes me that the planetary probes were very cost effective. As you know, the voyagers were reprogrammed to do things for which they were not really designed to do. And it bothers me that that money is being sucked up by the space station for a number of reasons. And first let me state, I would like to see man on the moon and go to Mars. My wife and I would be the first to volunteer. I've taped most of Rick's missions and I very much see man going into space. I'm just not going to think that the space station is really the way to do it. Certainly I agree that the space station has an enormous amount of politics involved. But then again, based on my observation of political system is that cancelling space station would not of itself guarantee you the planetary probes. That money would not be dedicated. Congress would not say we're going to take out this $2 billion a year or whatever and we're going to spend that $2 billion on the space program. They'd take the $2 billion away and probably wouldn't put anything in its place. Linda, do you have any final comments you'd like to share? Yes, I would say consider this. A lot of my relatives, I guess culturally Native Americans, a lot of our legends have star stories or stories about the space. There's also some tribes down in the Southwest who have these cave drawings. They were aware of all the interplanetary happenings in space long time ago, way before we were even aware at this point now. And there's even stories about different worlds. Like I said before, I never was going to be able to be an astronaut like Rick. But boy, I can see a lot of things just as he did and a little different perspective. But I feel like I'm up there right now. So go with your dreams and let's move this technology to the next level. I'd like to invite you all to join us here again tomorrow night when we continue this community conversation about what is the value of space exploration. And welcome to the second half of a symposium titled, What is the Value of Space Exploration of Prairie Symposium? We're glad to have you with us tonight and hope that we're going to have as much fun and as much information as we did last night. Joining me here in Clifford Hall Auditorium this evening are part of local North Dakotan communities. And along with us will be Tim Fote, editor and reporter of the Grand Forks Herald, Vivian Myers, a teacher from Bismarck, North Dakota, and Father William Sherman, a sociologist and pastor of St. Michael's Catholic Church here in Grand Forks. Tonight's topics will be the political value of space exploration, the educational value of space exploration, and the sociological value of space exploration. The question at hand is what is the political value of space exploration? And I must confess that I'm going to throw a lot of cold water on things tonight, I think the evidence at hand suggests that there isn't much political value to space exploration. But that's not to suggest that there couldn't be. And I think that what I'd like to do is take a couple minutes to think about the circumstances under which there could be. One thing that might happen is that there might be a resurgence of economic nationalism. Another set of circumstances might be a resurgence of redistributive economics. Space might be considered a sort of grand public work that would employ people. And finally, grimly, there might be a resurgence of political interest in space as a result of military threats. But I don't think that over the long run, those of us who believe that space is a noble thing and that we ought to be going further and we ought to be going, period. I don't think that in the long run, we're going to be satisfied with these circumstances. Space education and exploration is a perfect avenue for the students of the 90s, for they have before them a world of unknowns. There are unpredictable hazards and occupations yet to be discovered. These kids have to be equipped with higher level thinking skills, more so than ever before. Space exploration is a unique opportunity for this avenue of learning. Think for a minute, students trying to project into the future, trying to visualize what it would be like to live in space, to create a space camp, or to solve problems of garbage in space. These are the kinds of questions that we go through when we go through units of space exploration. Kids are turned on about these ideas and they are futuristic in their thinking. Maybe that's what space can do, is remind us, people who sort of fall into easy habits, that God is beyond us. God is the God of the universe. We see the pictures of the earth floating around as sort of a little part of a vast universe. Maybe that's why the good Lord, looking at it from a perspective of faith, brought aerospace into our world. The reminders of that other dimension of God, God, isn't something to be discarded, to be set aside, to be ignored, the power and the majesty of it all. And some of you remember that in the Holy Scripture it says something like this, the fear of God, the awesomeness of God, the awe before the presence of God is the beginning of wisdom. If you were the director of NASA, what would your priorities and future for NASA, what would that be? I'd say that the strategy ought to be survival. I think that the tactics ought to be to get rid of as many missions that involve exploitation, consolidation and filling in what's left behind and try to find a single mission that could have a fairly broad constituency economically and that could be as inspiring as possible. I think I'd do the public relations job. I don't know how it is. Maybe enlist the Hollywood and get them on their side. They seem to have a spokesman for everything out there and just dramatize it. I think they do a good job, maybe even a great job, but one of the things that I would change would be to advertise themselves more and maybe what the father here was talking about to enlist Hollywood isn't such a bad idea. It seems as though whatever the media presses, we get. A question for the entire panel, I'd like to ask them their opinion about the potential for access to space by ordinary citizens and depending on what your opinion is, how does that reflect on the value of space exploration as perceived by the general populace? It just seems that the cost would be so great that it's hard to imagine that in my lifetime people of my generation will get to fly in great numbers. So I think that you'd have to look elsewhere to find the value in space exploration other than you're not going to get it from the kick of flying. Somehow if we could capture the imagination of the nation with spectacular things, maybe what Tim was talking about, fix on something that has all sorts of ramifications, and we'll go along and we'll support it. I have a question for Vivian. Should there be a teacher in space, especially after the challenger problem and Christa was on board? Yes, I do. I think that if there is someone that wants, is willing, is prepared as much as anyone else out there that would have to go through all the preparation that it would take if they feel that they would like to and that it would be advantageous to both sectors of society, I think that they should. Tim, do you think the news media has a responsibility associated with selling space to the masses? I think a lot more newspapers and journalists ought to be eager about space and there ought to be more information about space. But I'm not sure that I'd assign the press a responsibility. Well, our concept of God change at all when we get in outer space and we're not down here on Mother Earth anymore and we look to the universe. Is our idea of God going to be any different? You can't look at those pictures of the earth and see this horse thing as a bunch of fragmented human beings. You know, the whole business of race and of national conflict and so it becomes so petty when we see what a one world it is. That's one aspect. It tells us something about men and women. But the other I'm convinced is it tells us something about the divine. My experience with this has been an affirmation of why I have become a space professional. I think my gut, my instinct, my intuition tells me that the value of space and space exploration is its ability to connect and its ability to bring us together. And there is nothing, I think, more dramatic than the last two nights that proves that. Here we are spread around an entire state and it's space technology that has brought us together over time and distance. This is two time zones and an entire state and yet it's one experience and I want to thank you all and I hope we get to do it again. So thank you and good night.