meeting with president obama. i suppose the closest thing we could imagine the president of france of being in the european union is sort of like governor of massachusetts. i think that's probably the closest analogy. but the european union, the new president, herman, the former prime minister of belgium said in his inaugural address, which i'm sure you've all read; right:of? : establishment of the g20 in the middle of the financial crisis. the climate conference in copen haggen is -- copenhagen is the first step. this is the approach of many people who favor moving towards global governance.

i think we are entitled to ask one year what is the president's view of american sovereignty? how does he view these issues? and i think we can see already that the president has -- president obama has a very different view of american sovereignty that the long line of presidents certainly since franklin roosevelt. in some respects, he harks back to woodrow in some respects he harks back to what willson and his devotion to multilateral process and outcome but i think it goes beyond that as well. presidents obama for example said in september of last year to the general assembly it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009 more than at any point in human history the interest of nations and peoples are shared. in the year aware our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game.

no nation can or should try to dominate another nation. no world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. no balance of power among nations will hold. this is a few that essentially says america is one of 192 members of the united nations. it's not one where we should be elevated over any other nation. it's not one where balance and power, politics applies anymore. and i think this view of america's role in the world stems in part from the president's lack of support for the concept of american exceptional was some, the distinction which moves him again away from bill longline of american president. now he was asked about his view of american exceptional the sum during the first trip to europe

as president and president obama in response to a question said i believe in american exceptionally some. that was the first floor of the sentence he gave as an answer. now let me read the last two-thirds. just as i suspect the brits believe in british exceptional was made greeks believed in greek exception was some there are 192 members of the united nations and the president certainly have gone on to say just as the ecuador yen's believe in ecuadorean exceptional was some just as the fosse in bowersox 14 noeth hasim exceptional listen, just as the popular new guinea hens believe in the new exceptional was and, if ramadi is exceptional nobody is exceptional. and this i think comports with the notion that the u.s. is simply one player among many. and i think the observation of the president's view is one that has been very widely perceived and i would refer to the

commentary that evan thomas of newsweek gave after president obama speech at the d-day anniversary on june 6th last year and commenting on the obama speech comparing it with president freakin''s famous speech at 40 anniversary of 1984 edwin thomas of "newsweek" said the following: we were the good guys in 1984. it felt that way. it hasn't felt that we in recent years. i bet you and the audience haven't felt like good guys in recent years, have you? it is a good thing about the media in this country but he said it hasn't felt that we in recent years. so obama has had a different task. reagan was all about america. obama is we are above that now. we are not just parochial. we are not just chauvinistic. we are not just provincial. we stand for something.

in a way, says evan thomas, in a way obama is standing above the country, of the world. he has sort of got -- she's going to bring all different sides together. now even for the mainstream media of course the reference to god is a little bit over the top. but leaving that aside the notion that obama stands above the country and indeed his role as president is above the country is something i feel we should find very troubling. it doesn't reveal itself in everything that is is by any stretch of the imagination work in all of his policies but the basic attitude i think is there and should be troubling when we consider its implications for american sovereignty. now let me consider some specific challenges to sovereignty that we will face over the next several years.

some of them fairly eminent threats, some of them are a question of continuing erosion of sovereignty but issues that by the very breadth of the subject matter that are involved show the challenges that u.s. constitutionalism and sovereignty face in the year ahead and let me start first with national security because i think that is obviously the most important defense of our country against threats from those external who don't wish us well. now i start from the position of just on national security but across the board that in a secular terms on this earth there is no authority superior to the constitution. that's a very simply. people talk about the role of international law and i like to ask the question does international law trump the constitution? is it superior to the constitution? there are only three

possibilities either international law, superior to the constitution or its inferior or its equal. i don't know how the system works where it's equal but i think if you ask most international scholars they would see if course international law trumps the constitution. the constitution is a reflection of what international scholars call municipal law as opposed to international law we. i don't view it that way and i think this is a great point. this is a decisive question that we ought to be asking politicians. in the priority in the hierarchy of legal systems where does the constitution if it? i think for americans it fits at the top and i don't think there is anything superior. so when we hear people challenge our ability to do things as basic as provide for our own air defense and make decisions about when we can legitimately act in self-defense this goes right to

the heart of the sovereignty issue. and it's been posed very graphically if you go back to 1999 than secretary-general kofi annan said the following and i am quoting unless the security council was restored to its preeminent position as the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force we are on a dangerous path to the anarchy. he went on a little bit later to say that military action in the world without approval by the u.n. security council was a threat to what he called and i am quoting again the very core of the international security system. only the u.n. charter provides a universally legal basis for the use of force. now that is as clear of a statement as you can make that the security council's approval for the use of force is required whether or not the u.s.

following its own constitutional procedures decides to use force in self-defense. i felt at that time that was a pretty remarkable statement of the wife come to understand how widely shared kofi annan's view around the world is so when senator helms went to new york in january in the year 2000 taking the senate foreign relations committee for its first ever hearing out of washington he went up to visit the united nations and he held a hearing in new york and i was one of the witnesses who testified. this was shortly after kofi annan's statement. swa testified to the committee and there was senator helms chairing it and right next to him senator joseph biden of the ranking democrat on the committee. and other members of the committee and the press and so long. so i laid out what secretary-general kofi annan had said and post the following possibilities. i said why shouldn't we have a

debate in the united states senate over the secretary general remarks? let's find out those who think the security council is the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force in the world and let's find out who supports that and find out who opposes it. up until that point on my testimony senator biden had been very quiet but i think i woke him up because he said with a net, and i'm quoting senator biden nobody in the senate agrees. nobody in the senate agrees with that. there is nothing to debate. kofi annan, he is dead flat unequivocally wrong. it is a statement that an overt exuberant politician like i might make on another matter but i hope he did not mean it if he did. i love him but he is flat out wrong. so here we have a statement by then center biden as the leading authority on the democratic

policy on foreign policy in the senate rejecting the idea that the security council was the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force. it will be very interesting to see if the dozens of lawyers that the obama administration has brought into their administration actually agree with that statement or not and going forward very interesting to see how it affects their view of american national security. this is something i think that obviously goes beyond the national security area of the relationship between international law and american sovereignty and i think it is something that the devotion to the international law and use is much of what the administration does. again, president obama said to the u.n. security council last fall we must demonstrate international law is not an empty promise and the treaties will be enforced.

now he was not specific about how the treaties would be enforced whether he would go to the international court of justice to do that, whether he would use military force. but the idea that somehow or another treaties many nations sign and a dishonor before the ink is dry can be enforced i think shows the theological significance that the administration attaches to the utility of the treaties to achieve objectives regardless of the actual performance of signatory nations. and i think much of the administration's policy in a variety of areas is motivated by an effort to implement that view. let's take the global warming on terrorism where the administration has famously announced through executive order closed the base, the tension does leave guantanamo bay that it would cease the use

of and hence to interrogation techniques and that would prefer more often than not to the trials in civilian courts rather than military tribunals of terrorists that we apprehend. i think it is clear from the administration's rhetoric that much of the reasons that they have desired to do these things is to satisfy international public opinion not because they feel they're actually obligated to buy american existing american law or constitutional procedures but because they want to satisfy the view particularly widespread in europe that those are the norm as they should follow. and when we see the administration either unable to achieve its objectives of conforming american behavior to the european norm it's not because the president feels it's the right thing to do. it's because he feels politically he's unable to achieve the objectives that he still seeks and will continue to

seek when the political the atmosphere becomes more conducive for him to do a. in the area for example of the international criminal court there is little doubt that the administration burins to find a way to resign the treaty that was not signed during the bush administration and ultimately have the senate from the statute and become a full member of the icc secretary of state hillary clinton said last year that it was, quote, a great regret but it is a fact that we are not a signatory to the rahm statute. this is something that again has near a theological significance for many on the international left and bringing the united states into closer cooperation with the icc is high on the agenda. closely related to that of course is the concept of your an verso jurisdiction, the idea any

connection to alleged human rights violations nonetheless have the ability to try people from any country in the world who are alleged to have committed such violations even today the administration has not yet said definitively that it will refuse to turn over officials from the bush administration who might be accused of violating international human rights norms through enhanced interrogation techniques. that threat remains out there and it is a signal, it's another sign of the athan stations on willingness to break from the theology of many people in europe and many people in the academic left in this country. and yet another area where i feel we are going to see more and more effort by the administration, and it will have if they are successful a cumulative impact on our sovereignty is in the area of arms control agreements. we've seen recently the

publicity attendant with the signing of what they call the new start treaty bilateral arms control treaty with russia that will be signed in prague on april 8th and you can see in that treaty the merits of which i want the date here but you can see in the present statement announcing why we have entered into this treaty part of that almost religious view in in the obligations and the implications of the treaties because he said signing the new start treaty is a way for the united states and russia to fulfill their obligations under the non-proliferation treaty which talks in aspirational terms about the legitimate nuclear weapon states eliminating the weapons capability and some unspecified point in the future and the president said and the secretary of state clinton said subsequently that the decision by the united states and russia to reduce the nuclear warhead

capabilities will influence others to reduce theirs as well and not to seek nuclear weapons. that is a statement of stunning naivety because the implication is as we come down the rulers of north korea, ron and other nuclear proliferators will say i think we should look at our policy of getting nuclear weapons because after all if the united states is reducing its foreign debt levels may be we don't need nuclear weapons. in fact i think the people in places like tehran and pyongyang say let's ramp up our production efforts to get the capability even more quickly. but it's not just this particular bilateral treaty the administration has made it clear it wants to resume within their view is progress toward in bidding for the united states in a web multilateral treaties that i think could construct

america's strategic options in the years ahead to seek once again ratification of the comprehensive test ban treaty defeated in the senate during the clinton administration to resume the negotiations over a fissile material cut off treaty and a treaty to prevent what they call the arms race and outer space and a variety of other treaties like the land mines convention that were opposed by the united states when they were negotiated because they constructed us in areas the were vital to our strategic interest and in the case the lands mind treaty on the korean peninsula. i was always happy during the negotiation of a land mine treaty that finland also opposed the treaty. and you say finland, what does that have to do with anything? and look at the eastern border. they remember prior conflict with russia. the finnish ambassador negotiations once criticized by

media from scandinavia pointing of sweden for example fully supported the wan mine convention and finished a diplomat obviously limited frustration said that is because sweden thinks if and when as its land line. [laughter] the point being there are a lot of important issues at stake here and the rhetoric of the arms control at the kibbutz is often divorced from important and legitimate american security concerns. this fascination with international law goes beyond including in the area of human rights where we've seen this administration demonstrate its commitment to binding the u.s. and international conventions by rejoining or by joining for the first time the new human rights council at the u.n., the body set up to replace the discredited human-rights

commission and we see in the session just completed our effective american membership and the new body has been who counted the number of countries specific resolutions in this session just concluded we found there were nine country specific resolutions for critical burma, north korea, the congo and guinea and the remaining five critical of israel. so that means five countries out of 192 were criticized and israel got over 50% of the distinction of having these resolutions. in short, this council is no different despite the u.s. produce a patient and indeed precisely as predicted during the bush administration and was its predecessor. the reach for restrictions on u.s. sovereignty i think is going to encompass a lot of territory in the economic and environmental area as well and

they are particularly on the question of funding for international activities. ever since the mid 1980's when the senate began substantial with holdings of u.s. assessments to the u.n. system the advocates of global governance have looked for ways to fund multilateral a activities that did not depend on appropriations by national which as bleachers and particularly by the congress of the united states in fact almost exclusively their concern was the congress of the united states not providing money like turning on this ticket. so they tried to find ways around that to fund these international activities we saw in the case of law of the treaty and an effort to use royalties from undersea mining activities to fund the authorities of up by the law of the sea treaty. we saw at copenhagen numerous

schemes for taxation of international economic transactions to fund environmental the activity under the various proposals that were negotiated at copenhagen. we have seen even today proposals by prime minister gordon brown of the united kingdom from international banking tax to set up a fund that would be used for future bank bailouts and financial crises. the idea come in a variety of different forums often very technical and often obscure and larger efforts that mean they don't get a lot of attention but let me be very clear the men in the united states loses the authority to tax its citizens and to decide where the tax revenues go the minute that authority is delegated to an international organization is a in violation of sovereignty as we can imagine.

that may be painful for the international left here but i think it's critical for americans given the basis of our own revolution not to recognize the taxing authority like the prosecutorial authority delegated to the international criminal court is something that we should not let go. now finally in a whole range of areas i think we normally would consider issues should be debated in our domestic politics, take whatever position on them substantively we will that the advocates of global governance keep trying to push these issues into the international arena and i think one reason for that, one very important reason is that they typically don't get the results they want in the space process in this country. they don't succeed at the federal or state level so they

say we are going to brought in this debate and internationalize it and get more support internationally than we would from our fellow citizens, and their hope is they can negotiate international conventions that they can then bring back to the congress and get through indirectly that way. now it's certainly true it requires a two-thirds senate approval but very often in these conventions the provisions that are critical for domestic purposes don't get adequate scrutiny. they are not entirely clear and the consequence of that is treaties' get ratified and then a few years later you find that actually with the scent that although probably nobody in the senate understood it was something that has a very dramatic consequence on our own domestic debate and this has happened in a range of areas i think the administration is quite try and others as well. one good example is firearms control. just last year undersecretary

state ellen tausher talking about what it called the underarms trade treaty said happily they have broadened the negotiations, and i'm quoting now so that we have an a through c list of meetings and for mom's on how to limit or e eliminate small arms, and ti personnel land mines and other indiscriminate weapons, and of quote. so for those of you that have a hand gun for protection at home or a hunting rifle commodore of alarms are now in the same category as antipersonnel land mines and of your indiscriminate weapons. this is the pattern the advocates of gun control in the united states who failed to achieve what they want are working with this administration internationalizing that concern through negotiations over the arms trade treaty and this pattern has taken place in a variety of other contexts. the death penalty for its

simple, or on issues of family law and discrimination. now again on all these issues it doesn't really matter what your position is let's say on the death penalty within your for or against it. in this country we have a full space debate on the penalty. sometimes new states adopted and sometimes states repeal. but it's a matter of open public debate. the question is who gets to decide? do we decide or does somebody else decide? and that is true of a range of treaties on issues where we've had the legislation in this country on the rights of disabled persons, on race discrimination, gender discrimination. we have debated these issues and have come to the conclusion sometimes the debates go on but you know actually we are capable of debating these issues without the aid of an international treaty to tell us what standards are acceptable and i think that is something we supply is far

more than the substantive out of a particular debate because once these issues moved into the international arena and become matters of international discussion that is the substantial reduction of american sovereignty. now what should we be doing over the next months and years on this question what should we as citizens due to be concerned about threats to and erosions of our sovereignty let's begin with remembering what james madison said during the debate over the ratification of the constitution 1788. there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power and by violent and sudden usurpations. that is a central understanding of the continuing threat to sovereignty because it goes across such a wide battlefront and so many different areas are involved at a very different

pieces. but i think the basic steps we should take our one, we have to understand better the implications for sovereignty as these issues are being discussed. often they are ignored. we have to figure them out and be alert to them and take care that our fellow citizens are aware. second i think just generally we've got to make foreign policy issues higher priority in our domestic debate. i know the president doesn't want to deal with foreign policy much less restrictive the health care system or our financial system or restructure our energy system or whatever else he wants to restructure but as citizens i don't think we can ignore the fact that the rest of the world isn't waiting around for us to get our economic house in order and these questions of foreign policy generally in the sovereignty in particular need greater attention and i think finally what that means is we have to insist on getting clear

answers from candidates for congress and incumbent members, for the presidential candidates as we get into the presidential season and the not too distant future to make it very clear thatview sovereignty and preservation of american sovereignty as a high priority. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. you've got us off to an excellent start. john has agreed to some questions and answers so the ground rules are pleased if you could we have microphones. wait for the microphone if you could identify yourself before you pose the question that would be greatly appreciated and also just in the interest of time if you could hold it to one question. it's all yours, john.

>> why don't you just go around. people are raising hands and we can do this as quickly as we can. yes, ma'am. >> my name is [inaudible] and i just graduated ohio university and i was just interested in what your perspective is on the issues relating to sovereignty and global issues with climate change. since climate change is a global issue which is affecting all countries how should it be dealt with while still respecting state sovereignty? >> i think that looking at what happened first at kyoto in the 1990's and then at copenhagen at the most recent negotiation shows the solutions that people are talking about our solutions to problems that have little or nothing to do with climate

change. many of those advocating greater international centralization of authority, greater control over the economy generally within the international level or the national level favor the same solutions before global warming became a problem. and in fact i think that some of these people would favor exactly the same solution if the problem were global cooling instead of global warming where they favor exactly the same solution of the temperature of the earth wasn't changing at all. i am prepared to accept for purposes of discussion that there is global warming and that it's largely a man caused. that doesn't dictate what the solutions or even if he simply accept all of that the kind of centralized control over the economy and over huge areas of human activity affected by the

climate change i think are unacceptable. if the only way to save mankind from global warming is by that kind of centralized control, then negative we've got a hugely serious problem. as i say i believe all the debate because i am not a scientist over the extent of global warming and the extended its man caused because i think focusing simply on the solutions being proposed show that they are unattainable from the perspective of anybody who values individual liberty. yes, sir. >> would you care to comment specifically on law better known as lost because i'm concerned some of our military especially the navy have come out in favor of that which seems contrary. >> the military lawyers have

favored ratification and the sea treaty for a long time. i think the treaty is a mistake. i think the regime creates over seabed and some seabed mining as a mistake. i think the authority creates a mistake. i think the tribunal what has been created is a mistake. that wasn't something people really focused on in the reagan administration when president reagan opposed the sea treaty but we can see even in the early decisions of the tribunal but it's already prepared to expand its jurisdiction will be on questions that directly affect the ocean and the sea. the reason the military lawyers have favored ratification is they believe the treaty codifies existing customary international law on the use of the sea in ways favorable to the united states and they think a lot can

get in there for in a treaty is a positive development. i think that is absolutely wrong. customary international law when it's not being determined by university academics is determined by state practice over china and the united states is and has been and remains the dominant maritime power in the world so in effect if we don't agree with something it's not customary international law, whereas if we put in to a treaty with 120, 130 other party is to change the legal standards in that setting requires their consent. so i think the united states actually is better off on relying on the customary international law and even on the areas where the military lawyers think that it is advantageous and since that is the only reason i have heard anybody raise the even justifies the treaty and since that reason is wrong there is no way we

should have the senate ratified. >> center for security policy. thank you for both a terrific presentation and the clarion call to arms on our sovereignty that it represents. i'm sure all of us look forward to reading the book coming out shortly. spec by it first. >> and then read it, right. can i just -- you focused mostly on secular transnational some and the threat it represents to the sovereignty. i wonder if i might ask you to address the sort of parallel and often combined threat that a rises from the religious nominally at least religious form of transnational is on in the form of those who believe under sharia law they should create a caliphate and specifically asked you to talk about one of the most recent developments really alarming developments in the human rights

council whereby united states government under barack obama co-sponsored a resolution with egypt on behalf of the organization islamic conference that would effectively not only prohibit but criminalize speech deemed by those year treasury yet to be offensive. this would seem to be perfectly in keeping with the threats you talked about to not only the sovereignty but the constitution and i would ask you to address what you make of that and what we should be doing about it. >> i take a very strong view of the provisions of the first amendment. it is to me the notion that you can carve out exceptions to the prohibition on the establishment of religion or pass new

blasphemy always that pass constitutional muster are so clearly violent of the constitution. it's hard to imagine they could be taken seriously. it is a consequence of the belief of the individual freedom that you are prepared to accept statements by individuals you find personally offensive, politically offensive because the effort to keep people's speech within the zones of reasonable inevitably results in censorship. so i don't have any sympathy for these ideas at all and i would hope that we don't succumb to these concepts in the united states. i think we can see already in europe the idea where they don't have a first amendment, where they don't have the kinds of protections that we do that restrictions on speech are

gaining traction and i think that would be a mistake. this is the first amendment is the strongest statement of individual liberty we have in the constitution. i think it retrospect it's too bad there were not a few more things like that in the area of economic freedom. but certainly we have what we have certainly we shouldn't seed those areas of freedom under the guise of not offending people. i'm sure much applies to today offended a lot of people and i certainly hope so. [laughter] and i think it's important that they're not be political correctness for whatever reason. that's what the first amendment says. that's why i believe so strongly yes, sir. >> sorry, we will get you next time. go ahead. >> david mcfadden.

do you regard the trial of serbian officials in the hague astor edition of national sovereignty? >> i think the creation of the international criminal tribunal on yugoslavia was a mistake because ultimately when you have a situation like the breakup of the former yugoslavia where abuses of human rights and war crimes were committed the society where the crimes were committed ultimately has to deal with it, ultimately has to come to terms with it. and it can make a decision whether it is in bosnia or serbia whether to bring criminal indictment against the people who perpetrated the crimes or to do something else like south africa did with the creation of the truth of reconciliation commission to deal with the aftermath of apartheid.

but when you take responsibility for dealing with these terrible acts and remove them from the society's in question, you are creating the possibility for the abuse to older again and the potential for a sense of victimization. so i think that the idea that people are not mature enough to deal with problems that they are officials created is a mistake and it's a very difficult question but i don't think you encourage political maturation by absolving the people whose name these crimes were committed from the responsibility of dealing with the crimes and i don't think there is one correct answer. i began the trooper can fashion different societies have to work it out for themselves and then others are entitled to judge the

societies by how they work them out. but sitting at a distant tribunal that is not directly involved in the societies themselves i think simply postpones the day of reckoning and helps with the basis for future conflict. yes, sir. this is who i was trying to get before. >> thank you, mr. investor. i wanted to see that in 2000 for mauney unit in baghdad we were tasked to provide additional security to abu ghraib once those atrocities were revealed in the press and we lost soldiers, american soldiers did not be go home because of that last year speaker pelosi was trying to get some thousands of pictures released that have already been used in criminal prosecutions and i remember directly we heard that europeans were speculating that will be a signature committed the would have subpoena power in the pictures.

and we knew that had something like that happened we would have lost soldiers because of that. and i just want to know if this scares the heck out of me like the scj is more dangerous than anything the enemy can through overseas on gist in the jurisdiction within would do to prosecute us for political agenda. and i just want to know what does the administration -- is the administration on the timeline for approaching that again? >> i don't know exactly what the administration's planas but i don't think there is any doubt that those who can see the international criminal court saw one of its functions to be constraining the united states. the argument is that under the doctrine called complementarity the venetian deals with allegations of war crimes on its own be icc has never been applied in the real world and if we were to conclude in this

country our soldiers did not violate our articles of war or violate the rules of conduct and therefore we were not going to prosecute them i think i would leave them open to prosecution in the icc and this is not -- this is not hypothetical where we came close to this and we can come back to yugoslavia the icty there were allegations filed with the prosecutor of the icty because the nato air campaign over serbia that we were bombing civilian targets and so on and so forth and the prosecutors did not reject those complaints out of hand repeatedly he eventually concluded for a variety of non-substantive reasons not to bring the prosecution but the court we created in the security council was examining the conduct of nato units and nato officers even though every nato member is a democracy and every nato member would insist on its

military following our doctrine in training on the laws of the war. so that's why this -- the implicit threat to the united states seems to me to be real. and why the efforts to come back into the icty icc and whole or in part or something we should resist. yes, sir in the back. >> right here. sorry. >> thank you, mr. ambassador. my name is kumar from greensburg north carolina. i had the pleasure of the voting for senator helms three times. my question to you is regarding abu ghraib and also most recently guantanamo bay, closing guantanamo bay would pose a huge danger and the united states especially bringing these terrorists to illinois. what are some of the alternatives you might suggest the obama administration? thank you.

>> i think the clear and logical alternative is keep guantanamo bay open. it's not like when the administration, the bush administration found itself in possession of terrorists captured on the battlefield in afghanistan and other locations around the world. it's not like we rushed to the conclusion we were going to move them to guantanamo. the very real and very hard question what do we do with them, and guantanamo actually turned out to be ideal because it's not american territory and at least at the time our lawyers felt that the constitution and interference by civilian courts wouldn't apply. but it also wasn't in afghanistan or another country where we would not have clear control and jurisdiction over the people. but that's not to say that anybody was enthusiastic about guantanamo bay or were they enthusiastic about the idea that some of these terrorists would have to be held indefinitely

which as close as you can come to analogizing to the geneva convention is legitimate since under the geneva convention real prisoners of war can be held for the duration of the conflict. it was because there were alternatives. there were not good alternatives and many people in the administration for years with every alternative they could and that's why gitmo was put there and is still there and honestly come in the alana administration that is why it is still there and i would be willing to bet by the end of the obama had ministration still hasn't been closed because they won't be as defined in the alternatives of either. the war on terror doesn't fit the conventional law of war in some respects but neither is it activity that should be subsumed under the criminal law we paradigm. these are not -- the terrorists are not simply bank robbers on steroids. they are people waging war against us and our allies and we of life and the need to be treated in that context.

i think it is fairly remarkable the shift in american public opinion that we have seen at the end of the bush administration media and political elites have beaten the administration into submission and they said let's close gitmo. senter mccain said what's close gitmo. it was one of the first acts president obama undertook as president and yet just this morning i saw that a new cnn poll shows that support for closing gitmo is down to around 39% from 51% at the beginning of the administration and opposition to closing gitmo is it 60%, way up from where it was because the people have seen the debate and they've made their mind gitmo turns out to be the right decision. is it a perfect decision? of course not but it is the decision that leaves us in the best position and there isn't any alternative. yes, sir.

we will take this gentleman than one other question. >> thank you. david forte. i believe china and the united states are the only two nations that successfully made a kinetic shootdown of a satellite in space. knowing how essential satellite communications are both to our defense and economy what we can we protect that and can the international hindrance in that venture? >> if you analogizes be set to the oceans it is perfectly permissible for the use of international sea lanes for military purposes. there is no question about it and that is why the argument that we need to prevent an arms race in outer space is a misapplication of the customary international law involving the oceans. besides that it is an area where we need protection for a whole

host of reasons, the communications, information, infrastructure, our ability to jews satellites for espionage purposes to protect the united states and its friends and allies so i think having the weapons in states to defend ourselves is only entirely legitimate, it's not anything we should compromise in the near future. and i think that's why we were right during the bush administration to sideline these negotiations on weapons in outer space and ye would be a mistake for the obama administration to resume those negotiations and have an forbid no pun intended, if they come up with an outer space treaty i hope the senate rejected. okay. last question. brent. >> brad schaeffer with heritage foundation. i'm going to ask a timeless question. the house and senate occasionally pass legislation to

withhold to this contributions to the united nations when there is the organization work some of its activities are objectionable invariably the senate and state department comes back and says these are treaty obligations that we are beholden and obligate to provide whatever money the united nations asks to provide. and i would like to know what your thoughts on that is withholding useful, does it advance u.s. interests and is it an obligation that the u.s. is bound to fulfill? >> i don't think there's any question that withholding u.s. assessed contributions from the u.n. system has been effected but getting the system's attention to make it least some small reform. i think the problem is it's not been effective enough. the argument that we are required to pay what the u.n. is assessed, with the u.n. is assessed by the majority in the u.n. and so i think is an argument that ultimately means

that we agreed to an international taxation and i don't think that is what we agreed to and ratifying the charter and i don't think that is really what the whole mechanism for funding the u.n. was intended to do. let me give an example. right now we pay under the homes biden legislation 22% of the conditions for most evin system agencies. what if in response let's say to u.s. overthrow of saddam hussein and outrage and memberships it just to show our disapproval of the united states action by a vote of i don't know, 170 to 20 or so the u.n. general assembly decided that for one fiscal year the u.s. share of the budget would be 99%. what people in the senate and house argue we were obligated by the treaty to pay 99%? i think just like to widen the

would be heading for the weeds to avoid that conclusion. i think the answer is to get away from the system of the assessed contributions entirely and move toward a system of totally voluntary funding by the united states where we would give money to the u.n. programs that work and with all our money from the programs that don't work. i think phill actually improve the u.n. system because i think right now the system of assessed contribution creates an entitlement mentality that leads to poor performance of the directors of the u.n. programs and the other member governments knew they had to show results or face not getting the money they would have the incentive to show results which presumably is something we would welcome. so to those who say but if you moved to the voluntary contributions a lot of the u.n. programs wouldn't be funded, i would say absolutely right. thank you very much.

[applause] >> john, thank you very much for getting us off to an excellent start on the lecture series talking about american sovereignty an idea that was obviously near and dear to the heart of senator jesse helms. thank you for helping us to recall his memory. jongh, nancy, mary, brian, thank you and also the health center for sponsoring this lecture series. we hope to have more of them in the future. thank all of you for coming today. [applause] [inaudible conversations] now a discussion on nasa exploration programs.

we will hear by proposed changes by the obama administration. this took place of the george marshall institute reed is just over two hours. >> it's my pleasure to introduce eric, the fellow at the marshall institute. he will be moderating the program. eric has held senior congressional staff positions as the lead a professional staff member for defense policy at the house armed services committee and a professional staff members and staff director from the house science subcommittee on space and aeronautics. he served the office of secretary defense and isasi deputy administrator for policy planning at nasa. thank you for being here and helping us put this program together. [applause] >> i will be very brief because i know you don't want to hear from me. first i want to thank dr. leslie for coming out. if you will find her time is tight, her schedule is tight and every time we have an opportunity to listen to her it

is something that will serve us well. lowry is the deputy and the minister for the nasa exploration systems director at and i forgot which code a's. she has a long and distinguished career in science is and served as the director of the goddard space flight center before coming to the headquarters. i always ask people which they prefer, senator headquarters and i want me to answer. during her time at nasa she served under president bush's -- legacy served on president bush's commission of implementation of the united states [inaudible] and prior to that a professor of geological sciences director of media right studies at one of the leading centers for astronomy. thank you again for coming. appreciate your time and the podium is yours.

[applause] >> thanks, eric. i'm glad to be here to talk more about the president's fy 11 budget proposal for nasa. when douglas cook called me in mid december i think it was to talk about joining as a deputy associate administrator i thought this could be an interesting time to be a part of esmd. leftkowitz like if the thought could be an understatement that was pretty much what it was to read it was indeed an interesting time. i've been on the job officially i think ten weeks. i arrived in the middle for january before the president's budget came out and i haven't stopped running since it's been an extraordinary time to be there and obviously time of potential great change which is challenging to everybody involved with the only thing harder than anxiety about changes, the only thing harder

than changes of the anxiety about the change so i think it's sort of as we can get out there and talk more about what it is the vision for the future is and put more meat on the bones of the programs the easier it will be for all of us to be productive in the way we move forward. eric mentioned i was in fact on the aldrich commission before i came to nasa. i was honored to be asked to be on that group when the division of space exploration cannot and if you go back to the report and look in 2004, things like a new relationship with the private sector and technology enabled program robotic skulls and humans and robots working together and science and exploration coming together in support of a vision for a sustainable affordable human presence in space is really what we were writing about them and so i actually think that this focus for nasa's exploration program is not that new as we've heard over the years we have come back to needing to have new

and enabling approaches in order to make this a sustainable program for the future and i do think that is what we are talking about coming change in approach of philosophy but not a change in the coal. the goal remains the same to see the human explorers out in the solar system's i want to walk you through a little bit today. some of the new program elements that have been proposed in the president's budget to try to give you a little bit more background and insight into the way we are thinking about these things. let's go ahead and move to the next slide. again, esmd job is to place into the system. it's an exciting thing. after i served on old bridge commission like kind of didn't just want to handle our document with the recommendations and go back to my lab. i was excited to think about coming to join and be a part of implementing a view of human spaceflight so i gave up my tenure and decided to join the agency so it's been an exciting ride to get to this now with esmd at this important time is a

real thrill and honor. so our goal again, that remains the same, human presence throop mosul were system. the change in philosophy and approach to highlight in the president's budget is more of a multi destination approach where we talk not just about the moon and by the way the moon is very much part of the plan we are talking about here but also mars and its moons as potential destinations for humans and also in fact ultimately mars in the near term because i am a star trek goral i like to see us out there beyond the system would be a defeat to within the seóul system morris is a compelling destination not only because it's scientifically drawls us with questions that are transformative but also because it drives the investments from a technological perspective. it's the hardest destination in the near term we seek to explore. sweet dr. sour investments in many ways. so it in the approach of the president's budget the way that

i think about this is what we are about in the near term years is creating the knowledge and capabilities that are going to be required in order to have a sustainable space exploration program taking humans beyond earth orbit tuesday. and we are doing that by expanding some of our alternatives to read some of the capabilities that are available to us as we moved out into the solar system. next slide, please. suggest again, sorry for all the words, just want to make sure i don't forget things begin something you could help us with, we hear a lot about how we are slashing nasa in the budget and in fact nasa's budget is increasing in the runout. it's 100 billion-dollar investment over the next five years in the future of the agency adding an additional $6 billion to the top line. our budget in esmd is supposed to be 4.3 billion which is a half a billion dollar increase over fy ten. again, we are looking obtaining key knowledge and demonstrating

critical capabilities. i could literally have in front of me a stack of reports from various committees from the nrc and various commissions which lay off the capabilities that we are going to need in order to have a sustainable -- laurie schambra gentry i will talk about those as we get into this talk. you can look. they pretty much all say the same thing and get four of the order of 20, 25 years we've not been investing at the level we need to in this capabilities that are truly enabling. so the idea is to spend very focused energy in the next few years to launch as develop the demonstrators capabilities such that when we are ready to roll those into the next human space flight systems which will be a few years away that we actually have those proven in the tool kit ready to use. ..

i would say that oliver recognized the challenge that canceling the program of this magnitude means and the people have devoted their lives and energies over the last five years, me included frankly have devoted a good chunk of my own energy to making a program successful. this is not a commentary on

their capability. it is in fact just a change in philosophy and direction. it is a challenging one and there's no doubt about that and as a result were putting a lot of energy and to contrast how we can do that posta properly and make that transition as appropriately as possible. so to talk a little bit more just and a picture for a minute about what we are talking about here come the sort of building the foundation is what we're looking out over the next two years, developing the needed capabilities in obtaining the rights that a precursor knowledge for destinations of interest i'm ultimately been to sustainable spaceflight programs comes the knowledge and capability for me to post with about this new plan. and i think what wilsey is in the near term will see a lot more activity, more lunches, more demonstrations, more in space activity and in the long term we hope to be enabling again that capability for sending humans into space that i can go to multiple destinations.

next. okay, so hurry going about doing this? obviously come in, the budget came out february 1 and we needed very quickly to react to that budget. so we have set up some internal study team to match nasa to do that. there sixteens and people put out there putting together initial thoughts about how these programs will look and how gopi operated and those are in six different airgas corresponding to six different program areas in the new budgets of the flagship technology demonstrations mlx reach of these a little bit more. each one of those has a focused team. we have a transition of constellation team that's looking at both sort of how we are going to manage that, but also making sure we have a good inventory of the capabilities that were developed and the facilities to the constellation

program, such that we can make maximum use of those would make sense to do so in the new programs. we been very intentional about that. is some crosscutting themes through integration with the international participation and also we've got participator team and hoping the public along with us on this journey in a more integrated and substantive way. so again, what are these teams doing? welcome on to say there's a lot of interaction with the white house and congress that's required with the new budget and helping us to make the products were those. but developing options to bring work for decision to the ninth floor or to the administrator picked their doing so to programmable cleaning. they're not taking very, very highly specific winners i would say. these are the initial set of formulations until we can get program offices established at the centers. next. okay, celestial skin into talking a little bit about these. so first the commercial crew and cargo development, there is an additional about $6 billion in this area over the next five

years come a little bit for cargo and fy 11 that will be looking at ways that we can improve mission success for the cargo delivery folks. for crew, which will focus on more today committed just do something very similar to what we did for cargo, which is initially probably space act agreement link approach for development of new commercial crew capabilities. in fact come with already started down that road a little bit with the initial awarding of the cced space act agreements which i'll talk about in the moment. it's a two-step sort of approach the like approach and the more crs, the service approach once they get a little further down the road on the development of the crew systems. again, what we're working on now is having conversations about the appropriate insight bottles for the development of the systems and how it is that nasa safety standards will be upheld. and again i think i hope we are something from the panel about

your perspectives on what would be the most useful. we intend to come out shortly with some draft documents around these issues for comment to you. and again, i think the teams there have been fairly interacted with the commercial community, trying to make sure that we do this right in and get it started way. with a great opportunity to do this well from the beginning and the folks were working with us at nasa are very committed to doing that. so here were what they call an emergence of an at the event of the press club the day after the budget came out because if my voice that's going i apologize. i'm fighting a bit of a cold thing. so first we had of course space exit or both were caught crs suppliers enjoy doing spectacular the first out of nine getting ready to launch. we'll show you something about that in a second manner new five received out foreigners who are developing things from winged

capsules to non-winged capsules to two different kinds of escape systems and sort of life-support systems and launch vehicles type applications for commercial crew. there's an incredible diversity here that sort of new space folks and existing commercial space vendors. i think it's very exciting. it's a very interjected entrepreneurial focus on the field right now and we couldn't be more thrilled with the progress that the folks are making here. it's going extremely well. just to brag a little bit more time i think the next slideshows and video of the recent static fire test. this is a full address russell for lunch including a 32nd follow-up test of the engines of the falcon nine. should be very successful and looking forward to the launch of the falcon nine coming up here in the next few weeks i guess. very exciting. okay, so moving on again to some of the new research and

development activities in this budget. so there are sort of three general areas that actually for programs that you will. the exploration technology demonstrations at $7.8 billion to five years, a very significant investment and again as this technology is worth effect reports from the last 20 years again i like to say this is not really rocket science even though cannabis. we've known about these things for a long time to develop and demonstrate these technologies, to reduce costs and expand our capabilities and i'll talk more about each of these in a second. a real focus on the next generation, heavy with launch vehicle that is an engine developed the program as well as foundational technology program there. we'll talk for about that and the expiration of a significant investment in sending robotic scouts if you will to the destinations of interest. so giving the opportunity.

our program is that the senate and it was a shame we have to give it up them but i'll are out and out across have found some extraordinary results on the move that are beckoning follow-up for where humans might go. in addition, mars and the asteroids are calling from us for human exploration. what are the things we need to know before we would want to send humans their? so will be following up on those as well. and i'll say more about each of these. so just again to put an exclamation point on the need to invest in technology. this is a plot of the mass of a mars mission, a human mars mission and not just any mars mission, this is just one we spent a year studying come design recognition by putting over my spirits of this is nasa's current baseline if you will for our mars mission is down here in the lower right. and this is basically normalized space station assembly complete is the thick dotted line. if we today, with today's technology decided we wanted to

go to mars, army should let other mass about 12 times of the space station. it's just impossible. we would never be able to get there. so it's not that these technologies are nice to have, they're absolutely required if we're going to have a sustainable path into the solar system. we cannot continue to push them off. so things like managing your fuel oil off gives a huge massive advantage, be able to do aero arrow capture, the king of advanced propulsion, close life-support comment resource utilization, i'm reading down the list here. advanced avionics, all of these things are absolutely required to bring down the mass of this mission to anything like something that's actually achievable. so we're saying it's okay, were no longer going to keep showing the spot and not doing the right level investment. we're going 12 demonstrates that these capabilities. we're going to demonstrate power management in space and fuel transfer. this doesn't include things like fuel depots are there other

things it can take advantage of to bring us even closer into reach. so this is sort of putting our money where mouth is when we say that mars is a destination of extremely high interest. and of course in addition, many of these capabilities would make lunar missions and astro missions that much more achievable as well. go into the next slide, please. so that's why we need to invest in these areas. and again, not just do a nice experiment to fly to space and prove it can do these things. so we will do that for the most part 2 flagship demos. again, we're detract about how mars can be a driving case. for example, aero entry capabilities, you don't really know those of the lunar asteroids begging to need them for mars surveyor on the list. we're going to try and start for a new technology demo space missions next year under this budget. three in orbit propellant storage is a huge lever arm on

her previous slide. inflatable modules. we can even talk about that. again that's lightweight materials essentially habitats with humans need to live. it's more house for your money. you can launch on a smaller launch vehicle with an inflatable rendezvous and docking. odyssey from assembly will be required only two.currently have the capability to do autonomous rendezvous and docking which russians do all the time. and probably fourthly program in one of these areas either your introvert van slyke support or advances his propulsion. but so what can exactly what the portfolio of missions is likely to be there. and again as we move forward, we will, based on programs and the new chief technologist area and things were developing our smaller scale technology programs will be feeding into the flagship demos. and you can imagine some of these technologies might lend themselves to being on the same

flight. so it doesn't have to be just do what i have to do an inflatable module if you could inflatable module that had an advanced life-support system hey that would be great. so we're looking at ways we can commend the things that make sense and autonomous rendezvous docking you can imagine about a planned several places you as a very exciting opportunities to partner with industry, partner with internationals as well as -- as well as potentially other parts of the agency through the teeth technologist of the senate of the minister of missions and other agencies as well are interested in advanced power systems in space. to which i don't arpa and dod for many of these areas. the enabling, dt dede enabling technology development and demos is sort of a smaller scale version of this. these are smaller to investment and key technology areas leading to flight were they when exceed

$20 million. this might be a program which invested in getting a payload ready for flight and handed author to a robotic precursor mission if you wanted to demo site institute research for an asteroid or mars. so again the areas that will be investing in are things like resources like human robotic airships, how can we best exploit the capability of humans and robots together. autonomous house of employment and landing services. and some advanced propulsion work as well. so again cut two sizes of our technology investments. and i can see him think this would be a program to the larger tech demos. heavy lift propulsion is another area where we're going to be making investments. we should talk about this is a technology program. we are going to be looking at developing a first agent into this program as well as in space engines. as well as investment foundational propulsion research.

so does both sort of tech development program, but it's a development program. so really it's an early for such a build in the next next-generation launch vehicles there. and again the goal is really care about driving down the cost of building these engines. next. by the way, that was -- go back for one second. i have to brag on our guys for a second. that was in the last week or to the bottom panels they are demo at a locksmithing engine that we were working on for the descent module. i'm sorry, event module that there's investments were making a buildable shoestring staff that are going to feed into these new programs. no head. thanks. okay an explanation precursor robotic missions. this is an exciting opportunity. of course i get the question of global holidays related to the science mission decided to send robotic missions to these planetary bodies all the time. it's true when they do so with scientific -- being driven by scientific questions that are

created by the national academy. and in some cases have overlapped with the human precursor needs are, but not always. and so in fact there've been needs out there for 15 years now but haven't been met. first all understanding the toxicity on mars and the atmosphere structure if you want to lay a much necessary. so we will be looking to fill in those knowledge gaps at the man, at ours, at asteroids that we need to send humans there. these programs will also allow us to carry some of those tech demos with us if we wish to. to test operational concepts perhaps that things like an asteroid. what is the best way for humans to interact a robotic mission to contest some of these various ideas. these are again going to be a wonderful place for partnerships, international commercial, with a wonderful commercial capabilities being developed for lunar exploration. we have to be able to capitalize

on some of those capabilities and their demonstrated. we're working on trying to advance the sort of partnerships. that would be wonderful. and of course the science mission directorate although we might have different goals we like the same targets and so the idea of being able to live payloads on one another's missions is a very compelling one. obviously in the international community does a lot of just implant robotic missions with a lot of wonderful partnership work to do in this part of the program. okay, thanks. next slide. so just to wrap it up then, i think this is obviously a very different approach to enabling future human space from then on but i hope you can see opportunity and possibility here. the challenge before us will be to paint the picture frankly better than we have a puppy section at the end to future human flights. i will tell you that is the thing were working on for today. we believe for some of these very early technology demos that

we should be able to feed these into graphic human missions. and we do put some meat on the bona fides and come back to you all and talk more about what humans fly in space on this program. of course we have international space station extended and i didn't mention it but until the technology we were going to do on board there. the one wonderful thing about this program is the space station is sort of the planet, not something that's in the way of getting beyond it if you will. i think it positions the space station as a part of the program, not apart from it in two minutes very exciting. we'll have astronauts they are throughout the decade and potentially even beyond. we need to position ourselves to be into deep space at that time and we are working fiercely to make sure that's going to be possible. one thing i hope from the above is virtue are interested in learning more and want to help

us and we will be very shortly starting to come out with opportunities and calls for information where we'll have industry days and workshops associated with all of this. such as we can have less interaction and more two-way interaction with the folks in the sermon others. so please watch for those, please watch our website. will be looking for others ways to interact with you all more and will need all the creativity that's out there. it's been a little bit frustrating so far to me and i'm sure t. wallace wells that we've had got to be a little bit -- we've sort of been hunkered down and were coming out of our shell over these last couple of months. so look for to interact with everybody more. pretty much everything i think it is written in our congressional justification, which you can find out more about it because two nasa.gov/budget. you can look lots and lots documents there to learn about this. thanks very much. i'd be happy to take a few questions and then i have to run back to work very but i will say

i have mark -- he's in the back at mark demos or program exec for tuesday for the panel to hear great inputs from all of you for that while i go back and work action items. so thanks everybody for becoming and i'd be happy to take a couple questions. yeah. [applause] >> he talked about getting started soon by limited activities. to the extent that congress is taking longer to come along to separate that but the schedule at jeopardy? is certainly true that we will not be going out and doing anything without talking to congress that were on the same page there. pretty sad will be in the fy 12 formulation. all the folks working on that now are essentially working fy 11 rollout or fy 12 runout

stuff. in terms of just putting out calls for information, we're hoping that it will be something will be a will to do and i hope we will to interact with folks as we go for it, but without disabling to dr. congress to make sure well on the same page about that. so we will be working closely on that. >> we have a question about exploration and obviously they'll be considering -- will they also consider whether it can participate how and where to go. >> i'm asking about how citizens participate not just once we were going for that input to the planet itself. i think that the great input. i will tell you honestly that i'm not sure that i've heard that subtlety if you will express by the team and i will take it back as an input to make

sure you ask a question. i think it's a great input. and i'll certainly be interested to see what people have to say about that. so absolutely. an from mac from mac. [inaudible] could you elaborate some more [inaudible] >> i've noticed, too. it's one of the reasons i came to nasa was to try and help with that. so i will tell you why were collaborators of the question is how are trained one and five expiration on nasa collaborating with what the formulation team

of snd on the team so we are collaborating for them, you know, 100 on the formulation. i think were going to have to see a little bit how it goes. i think that the easiest common disorders most obvious first with collaborating is to say, smt, we're going to limit or were going to an asteroid. are you interested and they would do the same for us. they would collaborate that way. and then the question is are there more integrated single missions where we might decide to fight together. that remains to be seen but it is something that's on the table for consideration. i also think, you know, for example, 2018 for the mars opportunity is energetically a wonderful opportunity to get demise of snd is there anything in a mission europeans. if we ended up signing for minnesota, we should talk about how he met courtney pat into a big international mars fast and

2018. and i think there are ways that we can do it that would make a ton of sense. i can't say much more about it than that though we are definitely out there considering all of these different mechanisms for collaborating. more importantly, i think we need to be out there soon, more out in front with the international community on cleaning these missions jointly because i think there's a ton of interest at the weeknight to capitalize on any formal way. marcia. [inaudible] can you talk about the research part of this and what she might think come out -- [inaudible] >> gas premise of the human research program yes. you see yes. you see that and i realized i forgot to put a slide in about that. but we do have a significant augmentation in the research program. human research program is we

tend to think of it as a fairly applied program. it's very risked risk driven so these folks have articulated what they think are the tallest symbols for sending humans into space for moderation. that's one of those technologies are capabilities that may or may not save you a bunch of math but you absolutely need a good or decent humans beyond the moon. you need to learn how to do radiation protection and deal with bone loss that all of those challenges that we face. so that is a program in which we do that applied research that allows us to answer those questions. a lot of research is done at the space station to expand the space station really does help. in addition right now where in the middle of it. i will admit the mechanics on the job in being a little crazy but i'm not fully upon where we are in the decade-old survey but i think they're kind of in the middle of it for biological and physical research. so the additional pieces that are fundamental in the biological process that takes place in somewhere currently in the middle of the decade-old survey there for both biological in fundamental physics research that is the state peers would

personally look forward to seeing the results of that. exactly how that's going to get implemented in the seeberger moakley was a little bit up in here. it's something where work and actively with esso nv to make sure we've got the bases covered there because a lot of that research does plate is on the station. it's something we're working on exactly how do we sort out. so have to get back to you with more details on that one. i'll take one more. >> you mentioned the google lunar x. prize. do you see nasa participated in some way to help them get the money they need to do actual workings? >> i hope so. i can't say anything about it yet. we're in discussions with them so i think it would be an exciting thing if we could figure a partnership that makes sense for both of us. well guys, thank you so much. i appreciate the opportunity to come speak and i appreciate the

support folks are giving us in this time but as i know a bit of a challenge. so thanks for coming out, learning more. if anyone has further questions you can e-mail me laurie leshin@nasa.gov. [laughter] [applause] [applause] >> i want to go ahead and have our panelists, but. lori, we really appreciate that and thanks as always. it was a fine job. one of the things i want to do at the marshall institute is trying pick apart some of the issues a little bit greater detail. in the first one we settled on was commercial human spaceflight. it's an idea that's been floating around for a while. it's got a lot of attention with

companies going into orbital space followed by space x. and the ambitions in some of the other companies out there that are talking about it beginning strenuous suborbital space and doing onto the north orbit. excuse me. so we've assembled a panel of distinguished experts who have in some cases spent time as humans in space, which is no deep these days. i'm going to act on the panel alphabetically and i apologize if i get the order wrong here in terms of where you're sitting. we want to do this as a moderating thing things have basically with the five-minute presentation and then perhaps my prerogative i'm going to try to talk to each other about some of the ideas i have some questions that just are sort of nagging me. i don't want this to be a retrospective on constellation versus human spaceflight or versus commercial spaceflight, which is sort of but it seems to

me the trap we fallen into in washington. i want to talk specifically about commercial human spaceflight, what is said and what is the name? is a realistic? i do get there if you've defined third and what kind of issues to have to tackle along the way? been the just introduced our panelists. start with dr. andy aldrin united launch lands. he served a knowing, done a lot of work at the rand corporation is due for analyses that is currently teaching at the space university and served on the faculty at california state university long beach and the university of houston. ken bowersox is a retired naval aviator with almost 20 years at nasa. as a an astronaut firefights in the shuttle, one he commanded the afs direct financial six. james muncy on the end has served twice on capitol hill first for the honorable newt

gingrich and then later his professional staff member on space and aeronautics. he also did a stint in the white house offices a sensor technology policy for policy development at both places and attend an asset. he is cofounder of the space frontier foundation with us contributions as president and a board member and kent rominger is also retired naval aviator in a graduate or other naval test pilot school and a former f-14 fighter, always the coolest airplane ever saw. he's also an astronaut with five shuttle flight. i was disappointed when he retired even though it's time to come. so without with that, and going to turn to dr. aldrin to lead us off. i'm going to go alphabetically because i can remember that. thanks. >> ocelot, eric. first of all, i really appreciate the opportunity to

speak your and kind of picking up on the thing that laurie brought up with interaction is really an opportunity i think for industry to voice some of their views on what commercial means. and i think you really are asking exactly the right question, what is commercial? what are strengthened with us this? have you implemented? and it's an important question. let me be clear right up front. i think we can make commercial crew work. i think we can do it in such a way that we pulled a robust industrial base. i think we can do it save the taxpayers a lot of money. but it's a program that's got a lot of risk. and a lot of that risk is really an embodied in how you define commercial and what the actual details are of an acquisition strategy. ..

let me start out with the upside with of this. there are several market studies out there that talk about the personal space flight industry potential markets, and i think that futurama has a study of about 300,000,050 flights in 2020. maybe some studies are higher or

lower. bob bigelow probably has his own analysis but that kind of gives you an idea. in comparison the u.s. government spends $66 billion on space, so it is good stuff, perhaps reasonable and useful market but it's not a second coming of the internet. it's not going to shape what we do with. so it is a reasonable objective. there are two things to look at. one would be getting the costs down. i think if you structure a commercial program appropriately you can probably not maybe two, $3 billion of the spending right now, $3 billion. savitt is a good goal and i think that is an achievable one. i think something else to look at that in some ways may be just as important is looking at the benefits of the industrial base. right now speaking for my company perspective we have eight launches from the national

security market. we are already seeing with the decline of shuttles some strain and specific pieces of the industrial base and that worries us. the additional of another four or so launches it is appropriately structured could have a benefit not just in terms of industrial base health, but also the reliability of systems. to get real liability by flying very often. so that is something important for us. so that's the good news. you know, commercial space is a dream that may well be becoming reality but as most of you are from washington and as you know any real washington power lunch begins with an appetizer of somebody else's dream so let's look at the downside of this. quite simply the downside is there is real risk commercial providers aren't going to

actually meet the up adjectives and provide systems in a timely fashion. you look at the structure nasa is suggesting space act agreements fixed-price contracts there's a lot of risks. this in fact what looks a lot like the contract structure those of us in the launch business dealt with with the early e lt program and its this close we can to exit in the business. i think both boeing and lockheed were very serious about the need to restructure a contract that wasn't working. and it's useful to remember. what you have to wonder is whether companies in the commercial space business are going to retain the same commitment because the truth is boeing and lockheed stock this out in part because they had another $20 billion of business with the pentagon and they were coming to this business at large. it's something to think about that i think the risks of exit

here is a serious one. as difficult as a discipline to be for the industry at you also have to look at nasa. this will be a different way of doing business for esmd debate nasa. let's be honest in the space flight business it is accustomed to getting involved in everything and stepping back from that isn't going to be a trivial change in the way they do business so i think there is risk there. what i worry about is this risk will manifest itself as requirements and stability and nothing kills a program faster than requirements instability. so that is something else we've got to pay attention to. there is one risk i want to discount and that is the crew safety and they are two reasons for this. one, we are flying in systems that incredibly reliable today and we are flying with a great deal of oversight. i think with addition of an appropriate the state system we can get to the reliability

figures that constellation was aiming for. second and maybe more importantly nasa and the american people are not going to tolerate a system which isn't as safe as it can possibly be. so i don't worry about that. so, at the end of the day what a reasonable set of expectations when you look at the risk reward calculation i think you have to kind of the attention to the downside risks. i think on the positive side there are cost savings that can be realized but as we start to structure a contract let's pay attention to avoid the risk of the total program failure that you end up with providers who can't stay in the business because it doesn't make sense anymore. let me get to the next question which was how we implement commercial crew and the short answer is very carefully. and i am only being a little bit flip, but the truth is we've developed a very reliable

process' seized launching over the last 50 years and one thing that scares us more than anything are changes to the process his that are already very reliable so i think as we look forward to actually operating a commercial program i think we need to maintain the core process and systems that we are already flying today. we like to think every launch we are conducting for the national security community is in fact a test launch for the nasa launch and i think everybody benefits from that. so to get to the chart finally where does this leave us in terms of a definition of commercial crew? as eric pointed out the debate today is incredibly polarized. people tend to think of it as a constellation type of program or something where you are buying tickets for astronauts the same way you buy airplane tickets and a really has to be hiding something in between. it is a false economy, no. that in washington would never have false economies.

but for just a second let's pretend we are not in washington. but set aside the hyperbole and let's think about this and maybe a little bit more nuanced terms because it think it's important as we mentioned earlier the way we structure this program is probably addressing the biggest risk that we have got in the program, and i think there is a sort of middle path, the hybrid between the government and commercial program that really makes sense. this chart shows various characteristics and i have picked five it could be six, it could be three plays let's start taking apart with the commercial means and looking at it in a little bit more detail. let's start with ownership. okay. so industry is already owning and operating systems. we are pretty comfortable with that. it's not a huge change as you go to the crew. the only issue that is we to come up as indemnification and a really isn't going to work.

i just didn't see buying insurance from the marketplace to make this work. i think the government has to indemnify and you will see as we walk through this that leads to other problems or other things we need to address. let me just put it that way. second characteristic, go ahead and click on the next one is the share of investment. in a commercial world the industry pays everything up front. and with markets certainty i think we could get comfortable with that but we've got to be honest. this is nasa and, you know, x 33 may be constellation. the record of actually getting the programs to flight is and why so it's great to be awfully difficult to ask the industry to put hundreds of millions of dollars of investment for a program that may not fly. if that is going to happen your kind of getting into technical details but it's been to happen

we would have to see some kind of termination liability that would cover our full cost to date as well as costs of money and it is of a trivial point right there. the cost of money. this is a difficult sell in government programs. we learned a little bit about that with a tanker. if we are going to invest c $400 million, maybe 400, this is really commercial by the time you get through the per unit got six or $700 amortized, six or 700 million amortized. that is a difficult sell. in some ways the government is better off paying the 400 million up front. that's always a difficult sell but that is something else we've got to address. let's get to feathered thing. in order to meet the work we've got to have solid requirements and it isn't easy. and this is in many ways the most difficult issue to deal with.

in all of the conversations i have been a party to about this the government has been fairly insisted it needs to be fixed price development contract and that is just difficult. particularly in the case of human space flight. just imagine what happens if there is any anomaly, small anomaly and the administrator has to get in front of the american people and they've got to explain they did or didn't do everything they possibly could to support the safety of that crew and it's impossible, in plausible i think for me to imagine nasa bald when they find something that could be better that could be more reliable institute that change. that is a set of requirement changes and in a fixed price environment this leads to a cascade of class one contract changes for every plus one contract changes got to negotiate and find the money and bring it in a to a contract.

that just smells kind of an endless series of delays and i worry that that is something that could lead to program consolation. here's another aspect of the fixed price structure that worries me, and it's sort of an odd one, but when you bid on a fixed-price development contract you expect a certain amount of uncertainty and a lot of cases requirements of uncertainty and when you do to compensate for that is built a margin. so he would have an interesting situation from the environment fixed-price development contract. trust me on this the management reserve in these bids are going to overwhelm any differences in cost efficiencies or design efficiencies and so you will end up with the lowest price higher provider or the choice based in large part on which company

decided to risk more, and i am not sure at the end of the day that's really the way we want to choose the next provider of the human space flight systems. it's an interesting problem. a couple of ideas to try and work this and again looking for the middle ground one is create a streamlined process for requirements, changes, and let the government told the management research instead of the contractors. a lot of details that make this a little bit difficult to implement but it's an interesting idea. i would also suggest another idea for this would be certain elements that are relatively low risk facilities that tend to be high-cost, low risk that i could get comfortable with fixed-price development so it could be the middle ground here is something that involves some combination of fixed price and cost plus elements. let me get to the second part of

the fixed-price contract structure. we just talked about development. once you get to operations i think it is a much easier sell. we have been doing fixed price launch operations for a long time and i don't think that we would be uncomfortable with the idea of the fixed price for the crew launch and that maybe the answer of what is commercial fixed price during the operations phase once you have stable requirements. fourth characteristic oversight of design and operations. so this is another area which is -- this is where you sort of get into a connection with the indemnification. if nasa is going to indemnify they obviously have a right to some oversight. i can't imagine also again with the issue of making sure that you've done everything you possibly can to ensure the safety of your astronauts.

i expect and we are comfortable with a lot of oversight. in fact we are already doing it. the reviews and the oversight we have from the national security community i suspect is every bit as detailed as human space flight in fact what i would suggest here is if the industry laid down what they are already doing in terms of mission assurance with nasa on the safety assurance site once we kind of got through the translation difficulties i think we would find that the vast majority of the things they would like to see are already being done on the national security side. so this is just something that i think we can work through. i don't see this as a difficult problem. next chart. okay. now we get into the fun one which is market risk. so, one of the things that we hear discussions about this the one industry to have skin in the game to invest in the commercial

market place beyond nasa. not surprisingly we are reluctant to cut it, but this wasn't always the case. let's remember it was about ten years ago we invested billions of dollars in the e all the systems that looked much more solid than the market we are looking at today. there was a fair amount of certainty to the communications market. some parallels with poles and market the consisted of 150 launches in seven years. a much bigger market than we are talking about today with the potential markets for commercial crew. i would suggest that one may be a bridge too far. it's great to be difficult given the uncertainty of the market's to get industry to commit and i think that's going to be very difficult. having said that i think once we

get to an operational stage i think there is a way to help enable a commercial passenger market beyond nasa and that is similar to what we're doing with the eelv today. if we can provide the service to that market place on the marginal cost i think we can probably get to the kind of price points that bob bigelow would like to see and others appear in the commercial place so that is a key piece of that puzzle but it's something that doesn't really happen until you get to an operational phase. so in the and i think this chart tries to get at a middle ground and i think it is a middle ground that at least ought to be a basis for the interaction that laurie talked about. these are the kind of things we need to talk about if we are going to have reliable cost-effective commercial crew. i will leave it at that.

thanks. [applause] >> it's great to be here. i have a few slides and brought with me but not that many. next slide, please. always start off with an advertisement for spacex. it's more than an advertisement. it's also kind of an example of what you can do when you pursue a commercial approach. when you take an entrepreneur who wants to accomplish something that is in line with what a government agency wants to accomplish and that government agency helps in many different ways it's incredible how quickly you can grow. the company was founded in 2002. we are now up to 900 employees and we have sites in california, texas, keep canaveral, we have a

site that is dormant right now at the annenberg but we hope to use in the future and also a launch site. next slide. these are the three vehicles. we have little rock at the falcon one which will be modified and to the falcon one and upgraded vehicle with extra lift capability. the falcon mine is the one sitting in florida right now we hope to launch this spring sometime. it's a natural evolution from the falcon. a lot of the guidance navigation and control is similar, the engines are similar. it was a careful move from the training rocket into the big rocket we are going to use to carry the vehicle that is the furthest on the right and that is the dragon cargo to deliver external and pressurized cargo to the international space station. when spacex was founded the intent was to carry humans into space and we hope in the future

to modify the dragon and a human carrying configuration. next slide. as the company grows we get things like a lot of other big companies and one of those is a quality policy. i like to show this not just to show we are becoming much or as a company but also to show some critical points of a commercial human space flight operation. space exploration technology is committed to providing the safest most reliable and economical access to space. next slide. another way to see it would be with these two simple equations, cost equation and risk equation. the risk equation basically states to take the probability of failure and multiplied times the probability of something bad happening in the even of that failure it has to be below a certain limit. then the cost equation says you

set your requirements, the requirements cost money and that has to be less than or equal to the amount of money that you have. everybody makes the cost decision when you go out to buy a car or go to a restaurant for dinner. i know those are very simple relationships, but in human space flight especially we seem to show a lack of understanding of them rather repeatedly. i don't think it is so much a lack of understanding in the relationships or the patience because engineers and technical managers are good at understanding that kind of stuff. i think it is something else instead i think what happens is to become so excited and thrilled about your program you think that anyone on the outside is going to give you more money so that you can do the extra things that you want to do and so the perception of how much should be available for most of us in the human space flight business is a lot more than the amount that is really available and so we keep running into the

same wall over and over. i think if we instead looked of some historical cases i think we would find a different message and maybe find that the amount of funds available are less than we expect but actually pretty consistent. so the next slide let's talk about apollo. apollo was a fantastic program. the vehicle launched several times, cruised to the moon. we have one fatal mishap during training for the early missions but in flight there were no fatalities. the capsule launched about 14 times i believe with a perfect record of getting the crew back to earth safely. but still after apollo 17 with three of the rockets built the development of a deal done the program was shut down basically

because of operations costs. and three of the apollo and saturn rockets are sitting at the kennedy space center, marshall space flight center at johnson space flight center as displays. so here is a program that satisfied the risk equation and that most of us probably at the time thought was satisfying the cost equation yet it was cut down essentially for costs. next slide. let's talk about the space shuttle. here's another program i think has been very successful. first flight 1981 still flying today and maybe a few more years. it's had two fatal mishap where we lost to seven person crews and a little love for 100 launches. there's been a couple of situations where the missions haven't been fully successful in the shuttle program we are good at declaring partial success and

that is something that you have to be an optimist about the most important thing is that on the partial success we got the cruise back safely. a lot of people would say this is a very expensive vehicle but if you look at what it can do the cost of requirements is probably pretty much in balance with amount of funds available and the reason i would stipulate that is we are still talking about whether or not we should shut this vehicle down. we decided five years ago we would terminate the program yet there's still a lot of discussion whether or not we should so i would stipulate that shows its close to the boundary line. next slide. now here is a vehicle i was able to come home on in the soyuz caps on top of the soyuz rocket booster and soyuz spacecraft, orbital space craft. this is a vehicle for lobbying since the 60's that carries three people into orbit and its

had two fatal mishap in the history both on the entry phase of flight when the crews were coming home and there's been five or six times when the vehicle was not able to get all the way to its goal the international space station or mir space station. there was a metal part of the history. statistical at about $50 million a seat plus some costs for infrastructure is the vehicle we are going to be fleeing with u.s. astronauts and russian astronauts and international partner astronauts after we shut down the shuttle for a least the next five years. and possibly longer. people would argue it's one of the worst defeat the first commercial ventures as far as a spacecraft the russians transition from purely government to commercial and in fact they are charging us money from seats. i would stipulate that this

vehicle is on of the risk and cost curbs and it's a good model for other commercial providers when they try to decide how much to do what you need any vehicle and how to set requirements. succumb next slide that is what we have done at spacex is looked at the different vehicles including soyuz and tried to benchmark against them and if you will get the deposit to the positives in the concert for the human carrying dragon spacecraft you will see that there are some improvements on the soyuz. one is we want to carry more passengers that flow were the total cost. we want to provide the capability for an engine to fail and first stage of flight the soyuz doesn't really have that. they have a very reliable engines. hasn't been a problem that we would like to have one extra degree of safety to be about to tolerate an engine failure. we are going to be using modern

avionics and software which allows us to be more flexible and adds additional operational capabilities. we also want to help -- we are also going to have improved capability to get out of the vehicle when you are sitting on the pad. a lot of people don't realize this on the soyuz used inside the capsule but to get out you have to climb up out of the hatch that opens inward into an orbital module and then you have to go through two more matches to get out so if there was a fire it would take awhile to get out of the vehicle and in america that is something we are very sensitive to since that is how we lost the one crew during apollo. so for the dragon spacecraft we hope to have a more streamlined capability. another thing we hope to improve on from soyuz is to give the crew more insight into what is going on with the vehicle and give them the capability to do things like initiate and abort.

a lot of people don't know when you are a crewman sitting on a soyuz you are totally dependent on the automatic systems and the ground crew to initiate and abort if something goes wrong. as a former jet pilot i like to have a little bit more control than that. i would like to know where the vehicle was going and would like a big red button that if i don't like what i see i can push and get off so that is something we hope to have on the dragon spacecraft. and then the last thing is inside the manufacturing and design as an american company there's a lot more that we can show to the folks buying the services than the russian partners are able to show to the u.s. government just because of international restrictions on exchanging information and data. now what tell you about is the stuff soyuz can still do things dragon can't do and i will let you figure that out by yourself

but in truth in advertising i have to admit there are some things the soyuz is such a good vehicle it can still do things we can't do with dragon. now if you look at the cost equation requirement is what i was just talking about you can see it isn't a huge step over the soyuz of the other way you can affect the left side of the cost equation is i.e. efficiency and these are some of the methods that at spacex we hope to use to improve the efficiency of our production. there is a lot of stuff there you can read it when you get what you want to call on the internet if this gets posted but a couple of things i will point out. one is the way we do management, our senior managers are very involved in the day-to-day actions on 54. that means when a decision has to be made at a high level the person has an in-depth technical understanding of what is going on and can make that decision

more quickly. the second thing i like to emphasize is the we spacex and companies like spacex can procure services. we can let a contract very quickly or even just go out with a handshake contract if we need to. it is difficult for the current organization to do. now he would say you are taking risks when you do that. it's true but because we can operate quickly if we take a risk and we are wrong we can regroup quickly and a lot of government contracting efforts because you can't recover quickly you have to minimize the amount of risk you take and that can be sort of paralyzing and stretch out development time lines. ..

that is the idea of healthy competition. competition is good. it makes you stronger, it makes you try to be more efficient or go you don't sick back resting on your laurels and just letting the money roll in for your product, but on the other hand that goes to the extreme, it can paralyze everybody in the industry and the whole country will end up with nothing.

a situation we have right now is we are having a lot of discussion over where we should proceed with our future efforts and how much of the presidents new plan should he implemented. we could find yourself discussing that for two years and then after we have finally got it budget approved, it-- we will be lucky if the contract can be in place in the government in three to nine months. at that time to the front of what it is going to take to develop the vehicles and we could quickly be out in 22016, 2017, continuing to depend on our russian partners so i think it is important that we find a way to work together and find a rapid way to move forward and develop whatever system we decide to develop to get into low earth orbit with our

astronauts and cruise. and i think that is where the government can really lead. they can help set up the right industry teams and look for solutions that help all of us when. [applause] >> six years ago i was involved in the passage by the congress of the commercial space launch amendment act, which was to create a regulatory regime in law for commercial human spaceflight, which basically created informed consent regime. i am really glad we weren't talking about this stuff then.

it would have been much harder to pass that legislation, because at that time it wasn't foreseen that nasa and the government would be as big a customer and commercial spaceflight activities. there has been a lot of fuzzy language and perhaps fuzzy thinking going on about perhaps commercial spaceflight over the past few months. as you said it has been somewhat ideological and somewhat emotional. some of that discussion has been malicious. i am going to use one example to sort of lay out wide this is not as radical as some people have said it is. if a congressman from west houston recently talked about how this would be like privatizing a major military system, and that would be wrong and terrible. when army reservist from texas are called up to go to afghanistan, she grabs her bag,

she catches a flight on southwest that takes her to a staging location somewhere probably on the east coast. the shin catches in their-- airport flight but it has delta or united, because the air force buy services from those airlines under using the civil reserve air fleet, using established commercial terms and conditions. and they only actually go on to an force assets, ac 130 or something like that, when they get to theater. when they get there, most of the communications assets they use or commercially funded, commercially owned and operated. the transceivers are a obviously military but most of the combat assets are commercial. all of the theater wide and even some of the tactical intelligence surveillance recognizance are commercial and all of the assets were

commercially launched. so it is simply not true to say that we do not, for very important national need, activities where lives are at stake, use commercial assets. we use them every day. now, if that vanguard organization of entrepreneurship and innovation at the pentagon can do this, perhaps even nasa can explore the capitalist frontier. i need to say as a disclaimer that commercial human spaceflight covers a broad range of activities in the commercial sector. it goes from everything from parabolic flights on aircraft with training purposes through suborbital space tourism and suborbital research and education activities. all the way up through commercial crew cargo and then commercial crew delivery to iss. obviously we are talking much different scales of activities

in much different capital requirements and much different technical requirements however there are some similarities in the activities. there are actually going to be hopefully at some point in the future nasa flights for experimenters on suborbital tourist vehicles and there will be a nasa safety process that determines whether or not those vehicles are safe for nasa funded scientists to fly on. so, nasa will be a very smart customer for suborbital activities as well as over till activity so there will be some pathfinders there as well as what is going on in the orbital sphere. eric laid out in a definition from u.s. national space policy of what a commercial space activity was and then asked the question, is a commercial? is commercial commercial by that definition and my answer to that question is yes. it doesn't, it doesn't mean all of the requirements perfectly.

but i would argue that to the extent that it is not purely commercial it is because government is accelerating the development of this new industry. this is not a naturally evolving commercial activity. this is something where the government has this unique needs that it needs to fulfill her code going code needs to fulfill it more urgently than would normally come into being in a purely private market or even in a private market with this sort of naca style nasa incentives and partnerships with industry to help promote its existence, very much like the department of commerce and other parts of the government that we do with industries and nasa does in aeronautics. this is a rush job, okay? it is enough sense not a purely commercial activity. it is arguably more than anything else they commercial style way of acquiring something that the government needs.

where nasa is a very smart customer, a very well-informed customer, is saying we need this we need to buy it. we can't write the way we normally buy things because we can't afford to buy what we would normally buy in the traditional manner. we need to do it differently and how can we buy it because nasa does currently by commercial services as it rise other things in a commercial fashion so it is bringing that expertise to bear on human spaceflight for the first time. and besides the space shuttle this activity, this commercial iss true delivery and transfer capability doesn't it exist except in russia. now a few things about what commercial is not. commercial is not about who nasa is buying from. to my left ear is a very, very

prestigious and very accomplished american patriot, who works for a company that is currently developing the first age of the ares one. that company is also a partner in a purely commercial launch vehicle called the athena which has successfully launched nasa's next to last mission to the moon back in the 1990s, is an excellent commercial launch vehicle and they think will be highly competitive in the commercial sector, both addressing government and commercial markets. so it is not about who you buy from. a tk could va commercial company certainly the part of knowing that works on the space shuttle is not commercial. the part of boeing that is interested in commercial crew is and sometimes it is hard to follow the scorecard or looks a little schizophrenic, it is because they are. commercial is not about doing something that is risky and frontier edge.

you cannot do apollo in a commercial fashion. arguably, you could not do the full orien capsule and all of the capabilities it is supposed to have been a commercial fashion. however, 45 years after gemini arguably it is time that nasa can acquire the earth to leo human transfer capability. so you can't do the hardest possible thing, the thing that has never been done before commercially but you can try, but it would not be a very intelligent thing to do. commercial i would argue is primarily about how you buy and what you buy. first and foremost it is about fixed-price-- by the way when you develop something on a fixed-price contract, you have already put private capitol at risk. people need to understand that you don't need to put private capital capitol at risk for speculative commercial markets.

if you sign a price development contract, private capital is at risk. the question is whether or not it is in the interest of the commercial provider to have developed that capability for whatever reasons, internal, internal needs, internal synergies, prospective external, commercial markets, potential commercial government markets. there has to be some risk calculation that allows them to put some amount of private capital at risk above and beyond what they did for the contract itself. i have been in those discussions between small commercial companies and also large companies and the government in which they said we are putting money at risk and the reason we are doing it is because it has this commercial to the roadmap and the government goes oh, we didn't realize it. well yeah, you have to eat it so i guess you have money at risk.

secondly, the government needs to pay for performance and not effort. i don't mean that to sound pejorative. obviously everyone working on the program and everyone working on cost-plus development programs are working hard and doing their best to serve the taxpayer. but the fact is that people are paid based on the unit of cost, not based on units of output. and so the question is, how do you decide what is an appropriate set of reforms criteria during development so that the government is in fact getting back actual real-world progress towards the stated goal as opposed to just some amount of money that has been spent to which fees and other things are added in order to decide how much to pay the contractor. and finally, it is perfectly fine to say that there should be some additional private capitol at risk if there are in fact some reasonable expectations of

private architects is the more emerging. however, in the past nasa has sometimes said, how much money are you willing to make at this business? or halves you should give us him of the upside. that is not capitalism. that is socialism. it is back. finally, commercial is as much not just about how you buy things but it is about what you buy. you cannot, nasa cannot buy the perfect system in a commercial fashion. it cannot decide what it wants as it goes along in a commercial fashion. nasa has to decide up front what it needs to have, what it really needs to have, no kidding needs to have. and can say it and can spell it out. and he talked about requirements you can't have that in the commercial fashion. now, if you want to change the program's requirements as you go

along, there are ways of doing that. they are called change orders and they cost money. and you have to renegotiate in effect the entire contract when you do it. which should in fact force you to discipline yourself and decide what you need up front. this is not easy. this-- commercial isn't magic. commercial does not say that you can do gary swan and orien in a commercial fashion and do it or a tenth of the price or -3/4 of the price. that is not what commercial is about. it is about saying what can industry actually do now that they are sure enough that they can do and it is a partnership. there will be inside an oversight and technical assistance coming from the government but the government isn't going to be figuring out what they want as they go along in partnership with industry which is what typically happens under a cost-plus development program.

you can't do that. you can't get a faster, cheaper, more affordable and arguably much more sustainable capability and have its do whatever you wanted to do as you go along. you just can't have it, so you have to be willing to say this is what we are going to take, this is good enough. it is not perfect. it is not what we want. it is not what we would design if we had more money. too bad, by his rough. i think it is unfortunate that commercial has become sort of the bleeding edge of the new policy and the new direction, because there is a lot to like about this budget, separate from commercial crew and the other things about it. there is an opportunity for partnerships that go well beyond commercial crew in this budget and i would just hope we can

work together to try to make all parts of the budget work going forward because speaking as a republican affiliated bersin, i have got to say that this president's budget for nasa is pretty great. thank you. [applause] >> thanks. first of all, there is probably a little unique. today i have heard a couple of things, safety and reliability is a given. what i would like to explain, i became the chief national office , the first space shuttle under my watch was the colombia, the ill-fated mission so i lived through that, lived through the office for a couple of years as we worked through return of flight, getting back on her feet and actually taking a look at hey where do we go from here. one thing that became very evident to me was a couple of things to the office, and by the way my friend here ken bowersox

was in orbit when the accident happened, so i spent time talking to him from houston in orbit, but what we worked through was hey where do we go? what is the right thing to do? what was interesting was emotion ran very rampant in some of the flight in the room were immediately, emotions were running rampant and we said the shuttle is too risky to fly. over half of the office had never flown so they didn't care if it lifted off with one booster. so we came together and said where do we go? what is the right thing to do? everything in life is a reward risk. what that reward risks told us was hey we have global obligations to continue to build a space station. we need to fly the shuttle but the truth is the risk. we demonstrated-- we were going to lose. when i flew in desert storm in combat my chances of dying on a

flight were one and 20,000, so we hired the next group of astronauts and we made it clear to them, this is a high-risk endeavor you are undertaking flying on a space shuttle. the other thing that came apparent, our nation will put up with loss of life that is a public national embarrassment, so unfortunately we lose more lives in a month than we have lost in the whole space program in the conflict in the middle east at what is different is it is a national embarrassment when we lose a space crew, a spaceflight crew. where we go, i was part of developing and the sleigh in the background from where i stand by them doing what i am doing is it has got to be reliable for us to sustain a program, for us to maintain our leadership in, whatever it is we choose to do, reliability of that vehicle/safety has got to be our

primary concern. costed my mind is somewhat secondary, but obviously, being a huge fan and taxerpayer i care about value so commercial is exciting to me because i think it is an opportunity for us to look at the value, to expand our space exploration, to expand that space exploration to continue that increase value. that is what it is all about, increased value so as we look at the commercial vision, look at these opportunities, please say hey this is exciting. we have folks, entrepreneurs investing their own money, coming up with renovations, developing new technologies. we as a nation need to capitalize on all of that. we need to look at everything that is out there for us to make our space program better and better value to all of us as taxpayers.

the ways you do that are through space tourism. we are seeing a lot of interest in that area. hopefully they will be increased interest as is the market really fair? that is a great question but hopefully it is. we need to do this in the true commercial sense, a prophet and obviously there is investment from that commercial industry, that commercial vendor who is supplying it. next slide. challenges, it is interesting. i talked about the challenges to the other panelists but the truth is, are we really fair and can we make a go of it totally commercially? i think the answer is no, you cannot. there is a mixture. you absolutely need the government involved. how much? that is really the question. the infrastructure, the launch sites. you probably want the government

doing that. if you look at the rocket, the launch vehicle and the capsule, commercial is probably wear that needs to go. that is one area where you can do it that there is a combination of teamwork and with the test by the background we always built up, stepped up in fashion because you didn't want to get surprise and we would call it going off the cliff. it is the same thing as we transition to commercial. we can't afford to get this wrong. we can't afford to lose their leadership in space exploration. there are a couple of examples. in a tk was pointed out, we are a government supplier, we sell rocket motors commercially to lockheed, two bowling. we have partnered with lockheed on athena, the new athena agreement so we are excited about anything that has to do with spaceflight travel. we also recognize them by the way we were partnering with kistler briefly before they

wound up going under again. it is kind of sad over $700 million has been invested into a rocket. it has been through cdr, but money was a problem. we can never quite get there. you never know if and when it will come back but there are some great ideas out there. economic lee, it is a tough business. next slide. what i want to point out is we have talked a lot about the government regulations, requirements are obviously very large and the fact is they are. to comply with the nasa requirements, there is a certain number of documents. that document itself flows into a whole number of documents, and embedded documents. those numbers of documents dr. huge requirements. this is a result of that. this line that line there is actually over 200 lines.

that is the performance back of the solid rocket booster on the space shuttle that we have been flying for well over 20 years without an incident laurie launch delay in the flight review and that isn't accidental. that doesn't just happen that we have paid for that or can we have do that-- for that through requirements. and those human rating requirements wind up driving over 30,000 requirements that we as a tk comply with. that is how we have gotten that kind of, the most reliable rocket motor in the world and the way you do that is kind of a three pillar system. first of all, you need a safe reliable design so wherever we go you need to look at the design. it needs to be safe and it needs to be reliable from the very start. the shuttle was actually a tremendous machine. i absolutely loved the space shuttle but the fact is, it is

so complicated and it is not a very reliable machine. so safe design, simple. the other thing that became apparent is if you are going to lift a lot of cargo in space you want to separate the crew from a cargo. you have absolutely got to have robust certification program. you learn so much in these programs that although they are costly and there is a certain amount of expense it is absolutely worthwhile and required to get the kind of reliability you need. lastly i'm going you need a very rigorous systems control process all put in place to ensure that in fact you really do get there. next slide please. if you look at-- i have got a tally of 478 launches that we have dissipated in and they are half-and-half. some have government oversight,

some did not. the group that had government oversight had one third the number of failures that those that did not. so as we move into this endeavor, reliability is a natural key attribute we have to look at. we have got to balance that with cost. the requirements joe pointed out that nasa needed to get right, getting those requirements set upfront is absolutely a requirements to do that. and i think we ought to look at a build up -- and say hey, nasa is putting $4 billion into the commercial resupplying programs with spacex and/or basel ii resupply space stations on dozens of flights. we absolutely need to continue that. that potentially could be a high payoff. i think folks will learn that they need to leverage what they learn, flow that into the crude spaceflight. we also need, the heritage

systems that exist, the constellation program today that has had over $9 billion invested, we need to leverage everything there including technologies from other human spaceflight programs into commercial, the follow-up. the bottom line is, i think what you effort from the majority of the panelist and i know from me is, it is an interesting trait. there is better value than doing things the way the government industry does it today with 32,000 shower requirements. on the other hand if you don't get quite enough requirements you are going to have some fatal flaws and you won't like that outcome either so the real trade isn't that. thank you. [applause] >> thanks. i appreciated. i think we have gotten a lot of

stuff out there and hopefully have a chance to think about it now a little bit and in the future. i have got publicly more questions than i should have but i'm going to go first and then we will take them from the audience in general. what i would like to ask the audience is pleased en masse proprietary questions. if you want to have somebody a proprietary question, see if you can ask them on the site in ct can get them to fess up. i guess is they want so let's not spend a lot of time beating up on people here to work-- reveal corporate trade secrets. jim alluded briefly to some commercialization characteristics and they sent around that i actually didn't tell you, i apologize for that, but nspd three, nash-- national space-- so we are first-- out to the first bush administration characterized the provision of products and services such that and i'm paraphrasing here,

private capital is at risk. there are existing more potential nongovernment. the commercial market ultimately determines the viability of the activity. primary responsibility management initiative for the activity resides with the private sector and i think we have sort of walked around with a little bit, but i really have to ask, our repair with with "commercial human spaceflight," and what are our prospects for getting to commercial spaceflight? personally i don't quite agree with jim that we have met those criteria yet and i am not at all comfortable that we will meet them ever, so private capitol is at risk. there are existing nongovernment customers. the commercial market determines the outcome of the the the the and responsibility lies with the private sector. i wonder if he could talk about how you sort of look at the market in answering those four

criteria, if you could? anybody? >> what i would say is the one criteria there that to me is the commercial market, the size of the commercial market. the government is going to kick us off. the government is the biggest customer to start with. there are other customers but if you look at the amount of capital the government will invest first, they will really be deriving the initial effort. what they will be enabling is the start of the commercial market. and that is what we would all hope will happen, but you can't say like you mentioned, you can't say we are there now. >> and he talked a little bit about long-term studies. i think we have seen sort of the commercial market you could argue and tourism over the last 10 years.

how realistic is it do you think that the government activity now will get us there? >> let me start i commenting on the market. maybe future studies are correct. may be other studies are correct. the problem with the market isn't just it is not a terribly large market which does have technical challenges to it but just the uncertainty of it and we really have no idea beyond-- i don't know how many people have flown on the soyuz, but the fact that there are actually-- seven people? the fact that they are refining suggest there is not an unlimited line of people waiting to fly on the sole sole use of the real world data we have isn't really encouraging. so, i think what worries us and putting our capital at risk is more the uncertainty in the size and if we had have certainty about the size we could invest appropriately to the 300 million dollar a year market, but we

don't. >> are we really looking at a situation where the committee we are looking at is not commercial so much as it is truly a different way of contracting with the private sector? right now we contract development contracts. there are $6 billion in theory, ostensibly for development. there may be more for services. are we talking about a shift in the way the government relates to the private sector, not so much the development of the new commercial market? >> i think it is important to emphasize that even a small amount of purely commercial investment or charges for tickets can really be a big enabler for a company because the company can be so much more flexible with that piece of the money coming in. government money, once you get it and it is yours you can spend it the way you want to but it brings a lot of restrictions with it. even a small amount of commercial money unrestricted can be leveraged to allow you to

do a lot more than you would think. >> let me address your question specifically. it is a different way of procuring and the question we are all wrestling with is just how different, and i would like to come back a little bit to what you post earlier. i think at the front end on the development side of it, it is just going to be really difficult to get to anything like the kind of hurdles that you were pointing out with nspd three. when you get to the operations side, i think then you can start to look at something where you really would be looking at. as they think jim pointed out very correctly, you would be looking at capitol at risk as we do on all of our nasa launches and their air force launches as well. we are putting our capitol at risk if we overrun it, we edith. so i think it is important to understand the differences between the developmental side,

when requirements are going to be uncertain. it is 32,000 requirements is an astonishing number when you think that only applies to, just the srm's? that is awfully difficult to codify that and anything like a fixed-price contract but when you get to the operations side you have a stable work garments. at that point you can operate on a much more commercial like basis. >> fortunately, boeing thinks that they can do a simple capsule on a fixed-price basis with sufficient funds. i think nasa is going to have to decide this procurement where they are willing to pay heritage contractor as the augustine commission recommended, or stipulated, where they are

willing to pay heritage contractor's that it didn't involve successfully in human spaceflight systems with nasa for 50 years more than they are willing to pay emerging companies that have not yet demonstrated human spaceflight capabilities. know it is a largr price tag. you don't get the two contractors or three contractors the same amount but you pay them enough than you by the reliability and the credibility and the heritage and the expertise and pay more for it. i don't think you get to have 32,000 requirements in a commercial capsule development program. they have to be functional requirements, more than design requirements. and that may be tough. i would challenge the statement that we cannot experience human

spaceflight failure because we have, and we have gone beyond it. i am not suggesting that the commercial industry should be tolerated to be less safe, but commercial companies are motivated to be safe also. it is in their financial interest to be safe. it is in their corporate interest to be safe, and you cannot pursue markets beyond the government market without that kind of safety. finally, at a minimum, even if you accept that there is no current burgeoning private demand for these services, and therefore it is hard to forecast that over the long-term, the private market will dominate the success or failure of this industry, which is one of the requirements in the policy

document you quoted. three out of four ain't bad, okay? and even if it is just a commercial procurement as opposed to an actual purely commercial, entirely commercial activity, the fact is that that step is required to get to the next. if you want to accelerate it. if you want to wait for it to come into being, and you want to say that the government, government's current demand for human spaceflight services is not going to be used to actually cause a private capability, commercial capability to come into being because we are going to fence that entire market segment off and you have to have a private demand grow up in a private capability grow up and then we will talk to those private capabilities about dying from them. you are postponing the arrival of the industry for decades and

i just don't think that is cost effective. i don't think it is american and i don't think it is a good idea. >> is there something in between like a commercial sense. the theory was there was a huge commercial market for this stuff and it turned out not to be the case. and, most folks, a fair number of folks in the industry will tell you without nga buying their stuff it can mean long-term service contracts, they wouldn't exist in every time nga comes out with a multiyear procurement with one winner the other guy threatens to quit. are we running the risk of too much too soon? there is ours the question the careful what you wish for when the government shows up with a check and says let me help you. is there a chance that this industry is just not ready and with the government intervention it is not going to get the

requirements. you run the risk of having a tug of war sets of requirements, one from the faa and one from nasa which some senators have indicated will be the case and some folks have indicated it will be the place. we may come to regret sort of taking this approach early. it is a question that we need answered. >> your question is a very appropriate one. the fact is, there are huge challenges when you step out of a world that we have been operating in. it may not be the best value and if you try to do this transition to quickly you may be very well setting yourselves up for failure and that is why even, who has control of us? faa cannot save you however nasa has the experience so that you absolutely need to work together on how you do kind of govern putting the rules for human

spaceflight commercially. maybe you start out and let the faa sort of break in and cut their teeth on the subflights where the risk isn't as high as going into orbit and over a period of time transition. in my mind, our space program is one of the things the united states we are extremely proud of than one of the areas where we are in fact one of the world leaders. if we don't do this transition right we are jeopardizing not being the leaders any more. even in the commercial world, you are competing globally. the soyuz started out with $20 million in their prices gone way up now but the shuttle is not going to be flying anymore government to government but in the commercial world it is the same. it is a global environment. unless the demand is so great, we have got to be able to compete with their price points

as well so we need to look not just at our nation but globally around the world and eventually we might see china and india as well offering up seats. we have got to be able to compete in that environment commercially. >> the transition i think has to be very gradual. >> fortunately it is a little bit more attractive to spend time at the cape them prepare for your launch their than it is from-- so there are other purely nonfinancial incentives for buying from american commercial industry. i think you are right. listen there is no question this is going to be a challenge. there is no question that as andy suggested toward the beginning, nasa could screw this up. unfortunately, because we have invested $9 billion in five years in trying to replicate

apollo, when what we needed to do was open the frontier, much as laurie leshin indicated was in the original report, we don't have the luxury of a lot of extra time and certainly we don't have the luxury of a lot of extra money. we can either demonstrate american leadership i continuing to do what we have always done before or we can actually try capitalism. we can actually try innovative partnership between the government and the private sector, including most especially established firms like you l.a., like boeing, like lockheed, like atk as willis spacex in sierra nevada in meeting this need. that is an absolutely essential me. it is not just required to have some human access to space stations. gosh darn it it you and i eric 15 years ago were dealing with

the challenges of funding and building the space station when we were congressional staffers together. i want this thing to be a success. i want there to be frequent, affordable, flexible, robust access to iss so that scientists don't have to go up there for six months at a time. they can go out for a month at a time. i think the killer ad is going to be technical research at iss and you are going to see new partners emerged. you are going to seem to commercial users and new federal agencies emerged as users of iss and the demand will grow as it becomes cheaper to get their and more possible to get their. i think we are going to see an explosion of activity at iss. we need to have that happen because iss has to be a success. if it isn't a success, then we are just talking. it really will just be a purely governmental activity forever

and that will not the fundamentally american activity any more. it will be something that only governments do as luxuries and that would be very sad. speak to me, that is the real upside of what we are talking about with this approach. that is more seats to iss, or access. if you look at what is going on at the johnson center right now they are looking at having to send astronauts away who don't fit in soyuz's or who don't want to take the time to go away to be trained in russia because that is a requirement for the space station. some may not remember when we first started with iss we were going to basically fly 28 people per year to the station. seven person crew's, three months at a time for 28 slots a year. now we have got six people up there for six months at a time with only 12 slots a year. if we have more vehicles, more

seats to station it really widens the ways that you can use the iss and allows us to achieve the full potential of that huge investment. [inaudible] >> thank you. let's hear what you all have to say and some questions. >> this is for jim muncey and the other panelists. noticeably something missing from the space program is support from the congress other than maybe congressman rohrabacher. [inaudible] what are the chances of this budget ever giving-- getting through? >> a lot of people in congress are frankly holding their opinions. they are waiting to see as

laurie leshin talked about earlier a little bit more of the details but i also frankly think that they are waiting for the administration to connect the dots. i am amazed at how substantive legal rich a proposal the budget is, but how rhetorically weak is. this budget opens the space are in tier. this budget makes it possible for americans to set up a solar system. this budget is everything i have ever wanted to see in a nasa budget. they just don't say it. they don't actually take credit for it, which is mind-boggling. almost as mind-boggling as a president who in other policy spears has regularly called a socialist is proposing a capitalist approach to space while republicans in congress are saying that it is bad and evil. i live in the twilight zone every day, and it is very strange, but i think as they

come out with the conference in a few weeks in florida, they begin to connect the dots, i think congress will get on board. we have always said the president's lead on space policy, i think it is going to be the same here. you are going to see congress get on board. it will take time. i think there are a lot of people in congress who frankly hadn't accepted the constellation was unsustainable. you can see members of congress even now going through the pages -- stages of grief. they have gone through denial. most of them are through denial. some of them are definitely still in anger. some are trying to figure out, what if we just kept this part of the program or that part of the program. would that be okay? you know, the one in my district fine.

you know, this is not pretty. we will see what comes out but hopefully most of the core program will survive and i'm sorry for the long answer. >> a question for ken bowersox. and he laid out in pretty good detail what you see as the way that this could work. he talked about how development -- and a pretty good starting proposal. [inaudible] >> i believe it makes sense, you start with a space act agreement type arrangement, where the company contributes some funding and the government contributes partial funding and sets the high level of requirements, the initial development of small. you have a small team from the government that is overseeing the development effort and then

as that development effort sort of breaches a critical mass, then you let a bigger contract-- similar to the way the cargo services were handled. i thought that went well and is going well as we work with nasa. >> the commercial services contract, does not specify money for development or is it all fee-for-service and then you have to use--. >> the way it works in larry williams from spacex is here. where you should correct me if i get this wrong, but the way it works as we have milestones that we have to meet as we go along preparing for the missions for cargo, so even though we are not carrying cargo yet we are getting some money from the commercial resupply services contract and that is based on, basically i wouldn't call them development milestones but

production milestones as we put the vehicles together to accomplish those missions. >> i work for congressman rohrabacher. some of us-- and secretary hayden was talking about the satellites they can put up in the next year and he was talking about reliability. he said that we cannot have a launch failure. understanding there is a difference between putting people up and putting satellites up, is there really a huge difference between the reliability means of those launches versus launching people? >> i guess that was directed at me. speak go ahead. >> the short answer is we don't really know. in other words we have got very rigorous processes in place that we think are about as good as

they can be to ensure the reliability. we have got customers that are very serious about reliability and when you have got spacecraft that are multibillion-dollar spacecraft but the on that spacecraft that are at least he replaceable over some period of time and upon whom thousands of warfighters lives depend, i mean that customer is very serious about reliability. as i suggested in my remarks, we have our processes for mission assurance. we have the way we have developed and operate our vehicle, and we think that is really good. we really need to sit with nasa safety insurance and understand what their processes are and what works really well for them. i think we believe that at the time we actually go through the whole translation process, we are going to find what we are doing is really close to what

meets the requirements for human spaceflight that honestly, this can't happen soon enough. we really need to sit down with nasa and worked through those requirements and we have got to do it now because if there is one thing we all have in common across this panel is a fear of requirements in civility. that is the thing that probably one of the worst diseases that any program can suffer from and it is reticular leave dangerous in this case where you have got 32,000 requirements which you are trying to work down from. so, it is in many ways maybe not the key issue but certainly up there. >> i would say there absolutely is a difference and that is the reason you have human requirements. that is the reason we do build in high reliability vehicles that fly the crew.

it is absolutely, it but think about my daughter if she were going to climb on the shuttle for example or any vehicle, i am very concerned so the more reliable it is, the more demonstrated it has become the absolute that are and the fact is too the design is key as well. you want a design that is simple. you want to minimize the number of stages. you want to minimize the number of moving parts where you can have failures so you absolutely look for a design that is going to give you inherently the best reliability. on top of that you put on crew escape which is something you can do with launching satellites you parachute the satellite back down and at the set-- same time satellites are somewhat unique. they are extremely expensive. we have got to be reliably putting the satellites into orbit.

>> general chilton was clear that stratcom that the base capability of the warfighters now gone. it has nothing in the pipeline that he can move up if he loses a satellite to a few move a mission-- lose a mission it is a net loss of his capabilities and specific to the rocket. it is to deliver capability for the warfighter. he doesn't have any more. >> for human spaceflight, we get confused sometimes with the term safety and reliability and a lot of people say why do you even need to use the word safety if you are reliable? here is why. if you have a vehicle that is reliable as long as it is reliable you don't have a problem but on the day that it fails, the next step is how does it fail? for a system that carries cruise, you wanted to fail in a safe way. and what that means is you would

like to be able to have your crew escape system function or you would like to have the chance of failure be so low that you don't need a crew escape system. when you start going through all the trades, i think what you'll find is the rockets that carry humans theoretically you could get away with less reliability if you have a way of getting off safely every time, but it doesn't work out that way. what you find out instead visit me to do be more reliable because the safety systems that are within our technology today are difficult to implement. >> andy laurie leshin i was wondering if you could compare the safety compared to the shuttle? >> that is a technical question that just don't have the details in front of me.

if you want those numbers off-line, you certainly have our reliability figures for alice, 9985, something along those lines. [inaudible] >> i beg your pardon? >> i think one in 63. >> i would say the reliability is higher than one in 63. >> a question for the panel back to the bigger picture. for those of us who have been around for a while, what nexus think that for years from now we are going to be back here in the same room with the same groups of people talking about the next new vision? any at of us in this room that has experience, we were big a big part of the team trying to sell-- flying commercial spacecraft in a few years later i was involved in commercial tagging sin we are involved with

venture star and flight 40 times a year. populating the skies with all sorts of spacecraft and people. it seems like we can't sustain a program beyond four years unless we have a cold war going on or international partners that can get out of their agreements. what makes us think this is going to be different this go-round? >> there are companies, some of them large companies, who believe that they can fly a capsule on an existing proven atlas five within four years. you can either believe them or not. if they are right, then things will be going on in four years, and you will see actual progress what doesn't work is long development programs that