Just as a reminder of what can be done with air travel, the present subsonic jets can get you from New York to Chicago in 12 hours. This will be reduced some by transonic jets-that is, the jets using the super-critical wings. On the other hand, look at the flight from New York to Moscow. With a future supersonic jet, that trip can be reduced to the same 11/2 hours now required from New York to Chicago. With a hypersonic jet, which we will be thinking about in 1985 and maybe other nations will have developed, we can get from Washington to Peking in 111⁄2 hours.

You might know that from Washington to Peking at the present time is something in the order of 21 hours. That happens to be just about what it took in the 1940's to go from Washington to Los Angeles. I happen to have made that trip, but not in 21 hours; it took me 24/2 hours, in 1945.

FUTURE FOR HYDROGEN FUELED AIRCRAFT

So much for air travel. But there is one cross-correlation between air travel and the space agency, if we can have the next slide (fig. 18).

We are beginning to see the real future for hydrogen fueled aircraft. Hydrogen has a much higher energy content per pound than JP fuels, and for very large airplanes and long ranges, hydrogen fueled aircraft have a real potential. The main problem, of course, is the cost. If you look at the JP cost, though, because of lots of things we all know about, it is going to increase gradually as time goes on. Hydrogen costs, on the other hand, will decrease particuTarly as nuclear-breeder reactors come into being. Hydrogen could very easily be a byproduct of the breeder reactor by using them in the offpeak hours. Reactors have to be on all the time, but you do not use the energy all the time; so it could spend its idle hours making hydrogen. If that is the case, the cost of hydrogen is expected to decrease as indicated. There could be a crossover point in costs somewhere around 1985. Hydrogen has a lot of fringe benefits, also. The environment problem is minimized because the principal byproduct of hydrogen burning is water. There is only one and it is water. I suppose we could get too much water in the atmosphere and that could have an impact on our environment.

As far as energy consumption is concerned, of course, JP fuel does not contain as much energy per pound as hydrogen, JP fueled aircraft therefore must be heavier to go the same distance, so we expect less energy consumption in the case of hydrogen aircraft than in the case of the JP aircraft.

Well, that is a kind of quick snapshot of what is happening or going to happen in the aircraft industry.

If we can recapitulate (see fig. 9, p. 249) in 1903, the first flight; in 1927, we were still asking, what good is it? What good is aviation, and so on. I can remember the New York Times, in the early 1930's. speculating as to whether aircraft travel would ever be economically viable. I wish I could have pulled out that article. I was 12 years old at the time, so that must have been 1931. It was asking what good it was, and 7 years later we had the DC-3 and the aviation age truly began.

CONQUEST OF SPACE BEGINS

May we have the next slide (fig. 19)? We can now ask the same question about the conquest of space. In 1962, the first U.S. astronaut was orbited. In 1972, 10 years later, we had landed 12 men on the moon, a very spectacularly successful program. But people are still asking, "What good is it? What does it do for me now? I know people have landed on the moon, but how has it helped me?"

Well, I am going to make an attempt to try to answer such questions. Remember, space flight is only 15 years old and 55 years behind the aviation industry. So it is much easier to project ahead in the aviation. industry than it is in the space industry. But nevertheless, 15 years is not that far into the future, so let's go.

REASONS FOR EXPLORATION OF SPACE

Next slide (fig. 20). (See p. 260.) The first question you might ask is why do you want to go into space-why do you want to orbit? Most of you know the answer today. Basically-here is a picture of the earth with only three satellites placed not too far out, maybe 8,000 miles out, you can cover the entire globe. With synchronous communication satellites, which are much farther out, you not only can cover the entire globe, but they are standing still with respect to the earth. You will see the impact of that geometrical factor later.

The other advantage is that, by putting a satellite in a near polar low or high orbit, the earth rotates underneath the satellite as it goes around, giving really global coverage over periods of time with a single satellite. There is nothing to slow the satellites down and the farther we go with electronic developments, the longer we can make these satellites last. So it is almost as if they were platforms sweeping out a portion of the globe every 90 minutes.

These are fundamental factors of satellite potential. Now if we can move to the next slide (fig. 21), we will move to something you are also familiar with, and that is another factor involved in exploiting this potential.

SPACE SHUTTLE KEY TO ECONOMICAL SATELLITES

If we are going to have lots of economical satellites in orbit, we are going to launch them a little differently than we have in the past. Just by way of illustration, this shows the number and increases in size of each new booster as we progressed. The largest is the Saturn V stack, and it is pretty expensive. We do not see how we can use the Saturn V at the present time for any economically viable enterprise. although it has great potential for further space exploration. So we decided the way we had to move is to the DC-3 type of operation. The DC-3 was really the beginning of the aviation age, and the Shuttle. which is shown here returning to a landing, is the key to the DC-3 type of operation in 1985 or actually, earlier. It is not just a factor of 10 in the cost for heavy payloads, but it has all kinds of other poten tials such as highly reliable, reusable payloads, payloads that you can refurbish, keep resupplying; and it also offers quick reaction capa

bility. None of those are available with our current vehicles. So the Shuttle will really be the big advance in the space age, and it will not be very long before people will quit asking the question, what good is it?

Space Communications

If we can have the next slide (fig. 22). (See p. 262.) Some of the aspects of space you are already familiar with, so I am going to try to extrapolate those first. The easiest one to extrapolate is space communications, because we already have a going business in space communications. We have 65 TV ground stations already operating in 49 countries. Space communications now primarily support overseas communications.

The revenue is $260 million per year to the Intelsat Consortium, and 33 percent of that comes to the United States through the Comsat Corp. If we move across, we notice that there are now 36,000 two-way voice channels overseas, compared to 8,500 on cable. This is a factor of four increase in just about the last 5 years. The number of voice channels has increased and if any of you have tried overseas phone calls, you know that you can get through right now as opposed to waiting up to several hours as you did in the days of cable communications.