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Thus it is all the more urgent that we exploit to the utmost the marvelous tools that space technology has already given us. Even now, few Americans realize that the skills, materials and instruments their engineers devised on the road to the moon have paid for themselves many times over, both in hard cash and in human welfare.
Never again will hurricanes smite without warning, after building up their strength unnoticed in the open sea. Every storm that moves upon the face of the globe is now watched by meteorological satellites, to which thousands already owe their lives.
Thanks to communications satellites, the "global village" is no longer a figure of speech. Yet the "comsat" revolution has barely begun. In a few decades it will have solved traffic congestion and rotting cities by making possible a world in which people can live anywhere they please, doing 90% of their business electronically, at the speed of light.
From their perches in orbit, Landsats and Seasats allow us to look at our planet with new eyes, surveying instantaneously all its agricultural, mineral and hydrological resources. And, equally important, monitoring their misuse.
The rockets that launched all these systems will soon be replaced by the space shuttle, which will reduce the cost of reaching orbit to a fraction of today's figures. Though the shuttle is only a modest first step, the story of aviation will repeat itself beyond the atmosphere. Many of you now reading these words will be able to buy a ticket to the moon at a price equivalent to a round-the-world jet flight today.
But the moon is only the offshore island of earth. We now know, thanks to our robot explorers, that the other children of the sun are more fantastic places than we had ever dreamed. The Voyager reconnaissance of Jupiter's giant moons has revealed what is virtually a whole new solar system of baffling complexity.
Man has always found a use for new lands, however hostile. A century before Apollo, Secretary of State William Seward was being castigated for wasting $7.2 million to buy a worthless, frozen wilderness. Today, most Americans would consider Alaska quite a bargain, at 2¢ an acre.
We will not have to buy the planets from anyone. The main expense will be getting to them. And now there has appeared on the horizon an idea that may ultimately make space transport so cheap that if a million people a day want to commute to the moon, they can do so.
It is nothing less (don't laugh) than a space elevator. First conceived by a Leningrad engineer, Yuri Artsutanov in 1960, it was reinvented by a group of American scientists a decade later. There is no doubt that in theory at least it would work.
Today's comsats demonstrate how an object can remain poised over a fixed spot on the equator by matching its speed to the turning earth, 22,320 miles below. Now imagine a cable, linking the satellite to the ground. Payloads could be hoisted up it by purely mechanical means, reaching orbit without any use of rocket power. The cost of operations could be reduced to a tiny fraction of today's values.