I'm Toby worsen president and chief executive officer of Alliant techsystems and a member of the Minnesota meeting board of directors. It's a pleasure to welcome all you to Minnesota meeting today. We also welcome our radio audience throughout the Upper Midwest who are hearing this program on Minnesota public radio's midday program. Broadcast of Minnesota meeting are made possible by the law firm of Oppenheimer wolf and Donnelly with offices in Minneapolis. St. Paul and major cities in the United States and Europe. Minnesota meeting is a public affairs Forum which brings National and international leaders to speak in, Minnesota. members of Minnesota meeting represent this communities leaders from corporations government Academia and the professions We are pleased to present today's speaker. Dr. Katherine Sullivan a NASA astronaut and the first u.s. Woman to have walked in space. A veteran of three space flights, dr. Sullivan served on the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery, which deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in April 1990. More recently. She served as payload commander on the first spacelab mission dedicated to NASA's mission to planet Earth. During his 90-day Mission the crew conducted 12 experiments to obtain detailed measurements of atmospheric chemical and physical properties, which will contribute significantly to our understanding of climate and atmosphere. Dr. Sullivan is currently assigned to the chief scientist Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She has a bachelor's degree in Earth sciences and a doctorate in geology from Dollhouse in Nova, Scotia, Canada. She has received numerous Awards and honors for her outstanding achievements at Nasa including the NASA exceptional service medal twice in 1988 and 1991. I first knew Kathy from our joint membership in an organization dedicated to the cross pollenization of Technology between space and ocean engineering. This group scuba Dives as a recreational part of our meetings. So I know dr. Sullivan is a very competent and knowledgeable scuba diver as well as a space walker and I can verify she is at home in the depths of the ocean as well as in space. I also fortunate to be able to list. Dr. Sullivan's one of my good and true friends the situation. I am very grateful for we are fortunate to have dr. Sullivan with us today to share her experiences and expertise and discuss and to discuss the future work at Nasa and NOAA, especially with a probability of budget cuts affecting their programs following her presentation questions will be addressed from the audience. Jane boracic and Gloria McClanahan of Minnesota meeting will move among you to manage the question and answer session. You may use the slips of paper on your table to jot down questions for discussion. It's my distinct pleasure to present. Dr. Kathryn Sullivan astronaut Aquanaut and friend. Thank You Toby actually the truest evidence of my friendship and my respect for Toby worsen is the fact that someone who has lived for 14 years in the subtropical climate of Houston agreed and even volunteered eagerly to come up to the Twin Cities and February and take part in this event, Toby used the the fine and upstanding words astronaut an Aquanaut to characterize the range of my Endeavors in the less reverent moments amongst our dive buddies in the sea space group The dichotomy that's usually drawn runs more like all wet or a space cadet. So I I Cover the Waterfront pretty well and that was very much to my mother's great dismay. Who as I was heading off towards NASA realized her choice was to have me somewhere around 9,000 feet underwater in the Alvin submersible working for lamont-doherty geological Observatory or possibly to have me two or three hundred miles above the planet in the space shuttle, and she just Once let herself asked with a little bit of a crack in her voice whether there wasn't anything of interest on the surface of the planet that I might. I should confess just I guess a few points about myself. So you understand the interests and biases of the person speaking to you today. I think in my truest heart of hearts what I really always have been it's just an Explorer of the old mold who of course to conduct the interesting explorations of the 20th and 21st century has to rely rather more on sophisticated Technologies and therefore elaborate National and Multinational programs. That is the way of the world today the days in which major exploration decisions were the province of individual families are single people and financed it small individual scales are long since gone the significant Frontiers, the significant issues and questions facing Humanity today do lie increasingly at the edge of our technology at the edge of our intellect. And so it takes Collective efforts to address them. They're probably at least a hundred different threads of discussion that I could have chosen to speak to in the 20 minutes or so before we take your questions given the full range of things that NASA and NOAA collectively are involved in I've lapsed back to my own interest in biases and making my selection today and I'd like to speak to you just a little bit about the combination of scientific and sociological and institutional challenges that coming to grips with an important level of understanding of our planet poses to mankind. One of the most frequently asked questions about space flight. I would say the most frequent except I think it may be just second place to how do you go to the bathroom is what does the Earth look like from orbit? And what can you see? Can you see ozone holes? And can you see the things that we read about in the newspapers? What do you feel like when you have the chance to see this? I'm pleased to say that the your feelings when you first look out a spaceship window and see our planet from that vantage point is something no one in any training mode. Prepare you for happily enough. That's a piece of surprise that's left for you to discover all on your own. It was indeed my most personal of motives for applying to the astronaut program. I really didn't think I could consider myself a card-carrying self-respecting earth scientist. If I didn't at least take a stab at having the chance to see the planet from orbit for myself and I would say after several hundred laps around the earth and 500 hours spending as many minutes as I can scavenge watching our planet. It was all very worth the investment on both a personal and a professional level. There are countless Unforgettable sights. If I had my slide tray here today, which I have not done In fairness to our radio audience. We could spend all afternoon looking at glimpses out the window that alternately amazed astounded Boggle you force you to ask questions the real Touchstone of a great scientific or educational experiences that you come away from it with more questions than answers and virtually every Glimpse out of spacecraft window. Gives you exactly that. What's happening down there? Why? Why does the landscape look that way? Look at all the sediment in that coastal zone. Where does it mix into? What does it come from? Is it is it just the soil if it's just soil? What does that mean for the agricultural Upstream will continue to be fertile land for decades to come or is its fertility decreasing now Paul's of haze over major both rural and urban areas of the world the Aurora over the Southern and Northern poles and times you fly right through one of the curtains of the Aurora and you think of every physics teacher you ever had who told you how those things come to be and you find yourself actually looking down a sheet a thin curtain that's one electron gyro radius thick just for an instant and then it's gone again lightning on the night side of the earth over full Continental scales when we sit in one city underneath an electrical storm and count lightning flashes. We have no idea of what the true energy. And the true energy discharge of that storm complex is when you watch the entire complex from orbit. There's never a second that there's not light flashing somewhere a good friend and crew mate of mine. Charlie Bolden has I think picked the best of all metaphors from lightning to orbit. It's as if someone on the ground has the Earth playing music and the Earth's musical system is coupled to a light system and as we fly over we can't hear the melody, but we can see the light show that it's creating. I've recently had the chance to challenge One Professional musician and sent him a tape of lightning from orbit and challenged him to see if he can figure out what the score is to the music. I've always wondered what the music sounds like your crewmates reactions are also interesting on orbit, you know, we run quite a gamut in the astronaut Corps from the steely-eyed hardcore test pilot who has never in his life cared about geography or very much about history and the focus and the challenge of flying airplanes and domains. No one's ever been to before Taken the best of their energies and they've excelled at it and suddenly they get a glimpse out the window and you just can't imagine how suddenly interested they are in geography and meteorology and oceanography and history everybody the flow of conversations around the windows, when three or four or five or six people watch some part of the world either known or unknown Slide by out the window everything from the questions to the anecdotes to the commentaries bits of history people recall. And again, I think everybody leaves each one of those window moments with a homework list. I really need to go find out some more about I think we just flew over where Marco Polo traveled. I really where did he go? I really need to go find that out. Just a sea of these things at every single passage of the windows another crew mate of mine made the mistake one time when half the crew was down below peacefully washing up after sleep period and eating breakfast made the mistake of looking out the window and seeing a particularly beautiful view of California and saying wow. Look at that, California is And about five minutes later, he commented that he hadn't understood how easy it was to start a Feeding Frenzy of the Piranhas because every member of the crew who heard him flocked to the windows on elbowed each other out of the way and just absorbed this delightful sight and then of course those of us who weren't currently on the working shifts that right. Okay coffee time and disappeared and he was still reeling from the crowd that had invaded him. Well many space fliers of every country find that after the experience of looking at our planet like this and with some time to let the Impressions and the significance of it settle in they comment that they find themselves substantially changed in their Outlook in their philosophy about the Earth certainly true that on one level as you fly around our planet every hour and a half. You come to recognize that the fundamental natural structures and boundaries of our planet are of a much greater overall significance than the rather more transitory boundaries and delineations that we draw on the planet as I've thought about that experience and their comments on it. I've come to the analogy that perhaps there's something here akin to how we all discover new dimensions of our national identity the first time we travel abroad and the first time that you get several hundred miles away from this planetary place that we inhabit and look back at it. I think in a very real sense there is some sort of a planet a recognition of planetary. Doesn't ship that awakens in each of us and we struggle with that because on one level it's a very idealistic sense that if only we all could understand this dimension of what we share on this planet, then surely we could do better at Living our lives together as Nations as races as genders looking a little bit better past all the things that differentiate us and finding the things that unite us. I hope that Noble part of this experience in this impression grows and becomes more widespread among all the citizens of our planet and that perhaps those of us that have had the very personal experience can help do that. On the other hand, I have to say that the view out the window even with the simple unaided human eye also provides some cautionary observations one can indeed fairly readily see National boundaries. Both peaceful ones such as Canada the United States or Mexico and Guatemala, but also hostile ones the angolan South African border which has been a locus of hostility for a number of years and various political boundaries that have been drawn in the Sinai region of the Middle East between Arabs and Israelis over the years. We see large-scale land cover changes that are clearly human and cause Mother Nature doesn't like long rectilinear boundaries. She does things and rather different forms. And so when you see a great big scribe across the land with a totally different cover and tone on one side than the other it's clear that human practices and human developments are the cause of that and then of course there are cities which whether they are in the Lesser developed countries or the more developed countries. Generally appear as large gray thumb prints against the natural color of the surrounding land and they're frequently accommodated or accompanied by bits of smoke and Haze or in some of the coal-fired and Wood-Fired parts of the world. And in the winter time accompanied by large deposits of soot on the snow around them. So it becomes hard to just take away. The idealistic message can becomes hard to ignore the more sobering message that human beings are indeed very widespread and abundant on our planet and both by virtue of our numbers and our technological means we now have the ability and do frequently Mark the face of our planet with signs of our presence and signs of our political decisions. These are I should hasten to add I don't think necessarily bad things that happen, but they they are the signatures of a large and abundant population Paul MacCready a known inventor and Explorer of the Aerospace domain has done a back of the envelope. Up calculation that sort of scales where we are in the course of human history and an interesting way. He's reckoned that by the end of The Next Century the total weight of people living on the planet will equal the weight of the planet itself. So there are a lot of us here and it's a sign I think of the growing recognition that these growth pressures and the consequences of our being on the planet of being so numerous do have some unwanted consequences that Drew the immense number of world leaders national International scientists and citizen action groups to Rio De Janeiro last year to try to address the combination of development and human presence and sound stewardship of the environment. Well, I'd like to shift gears a little bit from this very personal perspective on what one thinks about and sees and perhaps perceives a little differently from looking out a spacecraft window yourself a step a little bit further back and talk now is as a scientist a member of the international science community. And someone whose career is shifting into the directions of science management and policy talk a bit about the different sorts of challenges of coming to grips with global environmental issues time. Of course today doesn't permit going into the detailed chemistry or physics of stratospheric ozone problem or the greenhouse problem. Those are fairly well treated in the popular, press these days. I think anyway, but let's look at where we really are in terms of understanding our planning and its natural systems in This Global way that has come to seem so common today 1957 marked the inauguration of the international geophysical year really was the Advent of an era in which space Technologies most of which had been developed to that point for the purpose of fighting World War two were turned to apply to Scientific problems and specifically to studying the Earth itself. It's really the dawn of the Space Age. There were sounding rocket launches to study the magnetic and electrical of our Arm and around the earth and in 1961 the first very crude weather satellite was launched very low resolution black and white lined fuzzy TV type images that we would not tolerate for an instant on our six o'clock news these days we've become accustomed to a much higher standard, but they gave meteorologist for the first time a chance to visually determine what cloud features what weather features were Upstream of their location and would be drifting through the high-altitude air currents towards their city in the next several days. So the ability for the first time to sense a means of anticipating weather changes on short time scales and local areas. Just began to Dawn in a sense. This was the beginning just the Vestige will start of scientific recognition that the Earth is a set of large scale interacting and interdependent systems. If we had known this at the dawn of time, we would never have built our universities and our government funding mechanisms the way we've done with nice neat bins between atmospheric science and oceanographic Science in geology. And so forth Mother Nature didn't build the planet that way and doesn't operate the planet that way and therein lies another aspect of our challenge these days today. We stand really at a crossing point of several very significant streams. The one I've mentioned already the Advent of the ability to look at our planet from space whether it's Kathy Sullivan's eyeball or even more importantly the landsat's the Nimbus satellites the weather satellites and the sophisticated instruments that they carry the can measure the physics and chemistry of our land of our ocean and of our atmosphere continually and on a global basis with very good accuracy and very good resolution, very good ability to discern detail in what they're measuring. Coming along and merging with that of course is the computer Revolution which gives us not only the ability to command the satellites and control them but the ability to up the amount of data that we demand of our instruments to manage those vast quantities of data to put them into calculations and into models and come to fundamentally new terms with their significance global global General circulation models are a case in point never before have we had the technical capability to manipulate those scales of data and those complex equations and come up with descriptions really fairly accurate descriptions of the real physical world that our atmosphere represents for example, finally within the last decade and a half or so. There's been a very significant intellectual synthesis primarily in the earth Sciences Community, but one that has now generated a term Earth system science, that's not a program named. It's sort of an intellectual rubric and it's testimony to the fact that all of us living in our nice little neat. Ben's at the universities have come to recognitions that we must begin to work together differently across data amongst ourselves differently make our models are calculations are intellectual understandings of each our own piece of the planet mesh accurately realistically physically mesh together to provide a combined description of how the whole works rather than one or two of its peace part works. So we're starting to look not just at descriptions, but it flows of energy and mass across these boundaries that have traditionally separated our world. This really is nothing short. I think of a revolution among the Earth Sciences. I'm very fortunate I think to be living and be an earth scientist when I am because I think this is the second major intellectual Revolution. I've watched in this community in my lifetime the first being the real digging in of the plate tectonics theory of how the solid earth evolves and now this one that all of the earth science disciplines are fundamentally related. And it is in fact their relationships and our abilities to deal with them that determine how well we will succeed at describing and predicting and understanding how to manage our Global Commons. This is a remarkable thing. It is the first time in human history that we have this combination of the technical and intellectual means of understanding these key processes monitoring the key parameters the key fundamental changes globally and predicting some of the consequences. On a on several scales this point in time has tremendously significant implication for the science Community. I have alluded to one of them the data quantities that one now must be prepared to deal with to share and convert internationally to compute with to look retrospectively at to check the historical Trends. The quantities are immense and they are only growing at ever increasing rates each new system or satellite or computer that we bring UPS the slope of all the curves but at the same time if you look at the performance in weather forecasting, for example, each of those Milestones has also been marked by a step increase in the skill the accuracy of the forecasting models a lengthening of the time at which useful predictions can be made and a decrease in the number of times false alarms are given an important case study for this region of the world probably would be tornado warnings tornado and severe storm warnings have both shown those characteristic kinks in the Curve. Each one of these computer milestones in each data assimilation Milestone, but we're still grappling with both the scientific and the institutional consequences of understanding that we now have to come to a way of doing business. That's quite different than before monitoring sounds like a very simple thing. But actually it's a tremendous Challenge on both the scientific and the institutional level. Let's take it a look at one one case study here and pull some of these strings out. Let's consider the El Nino phenomenon. That's the phenomenon in the tropical Pacific where the pool large pool of very warm warm water that usually lies in the Western Pacific now and then shifts to the east your major changes in the oceanographic currents along North America and South America major changes in fish reproduction tremendous changes in rainfall patterns leading to droughts in some areas and catastrophic floods and others as early as the early 1980s. We really didn't even have the scientific means to confirm when a no You know event was in progress nowadays. We have predictive models that can predict the sea surface temperature which is the key signature of this event at close to one year in advance with about 80 percent correlation with the observed anomalies. Well, why do we care? There's some really phenomenal reasons to care about this if we have sixty percent skill and forecasting an El Nino event six months ahead of time and if the u.s. Agricultural sector alone took that information and responded by adjusting their crop planting shifting to a lower water crops in areas that were expecting drought for example, or more stress resistant crops. It has been reckoned by a group of 25 National scientists and economists that the savings per El Nino event is on the order of a half a billion to a billion dollars just in the u.s. Agricultural sector alone. If we could increase the skill of that forecast from 60% to 77 percent then the additional saving per event would be a hundred and thirty dollars a hundred thirty million dollars per year again, just in the agricultural sector, you can go through other economic sectors and case studies and other countries have done this looking at utilities Transportation tourism fisheries, and so forth and scale similar benefits. So the scientific challenge in that situation is to ask yourself the question as a nation if I'm willing to invest some additional money in my scientific capability to predict these events. Should I buy a new satellite system do I need a new data bank, or do I need some in situ measurement system in the ocean or on the land? Which of those will give me the greatest leverage towards increasing that forecast skill from sixty to seventy seven percent a non-trivial as it turns out scientific question to answer. For the El Nino case, it does appear fairly clear that the answer lies in a global ocean monitoring system instruments actually in the ocean because the oceans are the very worst model two components of these combined Global models that we use to generate these these forecasts. We don't know the third dimension very well. We don't know the actual way that wind blowing across the ocean both mixes the upper layer of the ocean and lower are layer of the atmosphere as well as exchanges heat between the air and the water so some fundamental physical processes are not well measured yet and certainly not well accounted for in the models. Let's shift to the institutional side of this challenge. We've now decided that our best investment would be to make some national investment in a Western Pacific Ocean observing system. How do we do that? How do we construct a national Investments scheme that lets us operate and implant a system like that and maintain it for the seasonal multi-year deck Adel time scales that the real natural processes of the earth involve right now, even as we speak teams from about 10 different nations are working in the western tropical Pacific on an experiment called the tropical ocean Global atmosphere toga experiment and they've got an array of meters and current monitors and so forth in place. Do we need to keep that whole array running could a third of it do for the purposes of the long term? It turns out as simple as these questions sound they're very very difficult to answer and then institutionally how you provide a funding stream for something as unglamorous undramatic on glitzy as a buoy that sits in the Western Pacific and warns you each year about an El Nino. That's a real challenge one of the most important measurements just as an aside on that point one of the most important. That brought people to the table at Rio last year. It was not the fancy satellite data. We see in the in the pretty pictures and so forth. It was an absolutely unglamorous set of data, but it is also the only truly unambiguous piece of data in the global change or greenhouse gas equation, and it's the time series of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as measured at the peak of Mauna Loa at the Mauna Loa Observatory. There's nothing very very high-tech about this a guy goes out with an ultra clean sampling bottle opens the valve fills the bottle closes the valve sends it to the chem lab an absolutely standard high-precision chemical analyses are applied to it and it gets surprisingly hard to keep a simple measurement method like that going for the kinds of time frames that were talking about. On a global scale. There's another dimension of the international challenge. How do we deal as a group of nations with issues that are decidedly transnational the wind needs no passport it goes wherever it wants it mixes things causes and consequences amongst all of us unlike the El Nino which individual countries can deal with somewhat independently on a regional scale things like stratospheric ozone and greenhouse gases really challenged us all to understand activities and consequences across all the borders and across all the economic differentiations that exist in the world today knowledge asymmetry is an important aspect of this challenge 80% of the people on this planet live in countries that collectively have only 10% of the research and development capacity of the world. So we need somehow to address that balance in training and education in the diffusion of both the data and the understanding of it and then also in the coupling of that knowledge to our decision-making processes you may be able to tell that I find the scientific and the institutional or human aspects of these challenges comparably fascinating I do so much. So in fact that I decided last year it was time for me to give up flying and get back into this Arena that I originally trained in time to not sit on the sidelines of this other Revolution anymore, but try to join in and help shape what may come a little bit in the future the good news. I think nationally and internationally is abundant. There is a better level of awareness of some of these issues and of the need to work together than we've seen. I think in history, there are very genuine efforts at all levels of the science community and in many Halls of government around the world to bring the required people together and to forge new handshakes new mechanisms to let us deal with these things the United Nations conference on economic the economy and our the environment and development and Rio last year, I think planets very worthwhile seeds perhaps not all the seeds we would have wanted and maybe they didn't Sprout as quickly as we'd like, but I It will Sprout over time and if there is one fundamentally optimistic note to sound it's this one which I would leave you on and turn to your questions. The Carnegie commission recently convened a panel to address these large-scale international issues of knowledge diffusion and international decision-making and they point out this thing. I think we can all take open their to quote them. They say fortunately the rate of growth of the total fund of human knowledge is still greater than the rate of Economic and population growth. We're still slightly ahead of the power curve and our challenge is to stay there and to make good use of what we know. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dr. Sullivan. We have a first question here from Rod bits. Yes, I given the changes in the former Soviet Union. I wonder if you could comment on what you see as the future for the Russian Space Program. I almost think it's too early to tell some obviously some major dislocations and changes are disruptions can be seen now, but what their long-term consequence would be very difficult to say and I don't have a very good crystal ball. They are continuing to man The Mir space station and their official pronouncements make it clear that they hope and intend to keep that as top priority. They also have in the pipeline programs to add different functional modules and Earth Sciences module for example to mirror and to upgrade its systems to sort of a mere two and they I think are doing fairly well at keeping their heavy machinery bureaus that produce their really work horse man boosters going at the same time polls in the opposite direction are numerous. I don't think it's very likely their space shuttle will fly in the very near term again the reports vary considerably about whether it's completely mothballed and won't ever fly again or it's just in a long hiatus. There are increasingly difficult new difficulties in conducting all of their operations given the geographic dispersion of some of their facilities. They've never before had to deal with multi Republic negotiations to accomplish a launch now, however, the baikonur cosmodrome which is their main man facility is in a different Republic than the rest of the Russian space agency. It's in Kazakhstan. So there are an increasing array of challenges for them cash flow is tough salaries are tough to maintain access to the high-tech goods and services that they need is a high priority for them. There are a lot of new fronts opening up to both Market their data and services to the rest of the world as well as to bring International expertise in so it's a very turbulent time and I think it's really too soon to tell what the fundamental geometry will end up being Thank you. Dr. Sullivan a reminder to our listening audience. We are listening to dr. Kathryn Sullivan NASA astronaut speaking to Minnesota meeting on the station's of Minnesota Public Radio. Our next question is from David Andreas. Would you please comment at all on any kind of spiritual experience that you had having looked at the Earth from the perspective as an astronaut? I'm not of the opinion that one gets geometrically closer to whatever power when believes guides the universe by linear travel in any direction. So I really didn't feel I was and you were fundamentally different in orbit than I always am and I guess I would say on that level, you know, all all profound insights about life and the challenges of living on this planet. Should I would hope couple 21 spiritual understanding of things as well. I found it did for me but I wouldn't say that I'm aware of a profound shift. You neither my fundamental beliefs or some of the things I had an intellectual perspective on now that may be a little contrived on my part. I had already spent most of my adult life studying the cultural and natural geography of our planet before I flew so it was illustration and Truth check on things. I had tried to learn by books and travel on the ground for many many years. Dr. Sullivan the corporate sponsors of Minnesota meeting have created a special partnership with Twin City Schools to bring students and teachers to the Minnesota meeting. We have a number of students here today. And our first question from Mike boulos a Humboldt. I Yeah, my question is a do you see a connection between the experiments what you've done in space into your present day working interests? Yes. I've been very lucky in that regard on both my first and my third flights most of the experiments on board were earth science oriented experiments. They covered a wide range from high resolution mapping cameras synthetic aperture radar ours to a host of atmospheric spectrometers that made detailed vertical profile measurements of the key Trace gases in the atmosphere and solar irradiance monitors that measure the energy output from the sun which of course is the fundamental driver of our atmosphere and our ocean is the amount of energy the sun bathes our planet with every day. The the measured amount of temperature change we've seen on the earth over the last century is not only consistent with what some of the computer models say might be caused by enhanced Greenhouse effects. It's also quite consistent with small variations in the output of the Sun and we've never yet measured. Over several solar Cycles the output of the sun with enough Precision to be confident that we can differentiate those two effects others are very fundamental limitation and how well we understand the real workings of our planet. So I've been very fortunate in that regard. It's made those two flights in particular extra Delights to me. Thank you. Dr. Sullivan. Our next question is from Jerry steal who's from Richfield High School. Hello, dr. Sullivan. I'd like to ask him with Clinton reducing the budget for space station freedom. And NASA has a hole. Basically. I'd like to ask what do you think NASA's future is in the United States and specifically what kind of opportunities that youth have to enter the space program. That's a really timely question Jerry. And again, I don't have a perfect crystal ball. So add some grains of salt into my answer. I think NASA with the array of programs and capabilities that it brings to the National table has a number of very good opportunities to play Central roles in the administration's announced plans to make technology and National competitiveness key focal points of their programs, and I'm sure we obviously will be doing as best we can to represent those programs in their best light and see which of them may be chosen as key instruments in. Mr. Clinton's plans space station. Freedom has been a challenging program from its very start. It is not a trivial exercise to put a complex National caliber lat Tori in orbit, there are debates about the value of the science that might be done on such a platform. My personal view is that there is valuable work in the Life Sciences Arena and in materials physics of materials that can be done there and that it would be worth investing in the international commitments that we've made over the years with a number of other countries to work on a specific station together are significant factors. I think that have to be taken into account as are the Investments that have already been made and the number of jobs that will be that are wrapped up into the program. So, you know, I think we have to be willing to sit back down on the table when we were instructed with a new budget and some different directions and determine how we can bring the best possible Advantage back to the country for that investment that it's willing to make it's unrealistic to expect that targets and adjustments will never happen through the course of a program, but it does add to the difficulty of getting to an end goal. So I think we've been given a homework assignment and it's a tough one and we'll just have to settle Team to work and see how well we can do on it. Thank you. Dr. Sullivan have a question from Jennifer gasperini from Hamline University. Your responsibilities include both atmosphere and oceans. Can you talk some more about the future of oceanic research? I see my prediction would be that Oceanic research should be coming back into a sort of re-emerging phase within the u.s. Equation as well as internationally and it's mainly for the reasons that I alluded to in my formal remarks as we've progressed and being able to forecast short-term and fairly local Regional effects within the atmosphere. We've come to recognize more and more clearly that the current one of the current fundamental limits on how well we can do that job is the very poor way that we characterize and monitor and measure the ocean. So there's a lot of Leverage and better understanding the ocean and it's physics and chemistry a lot of Leverage to dress the greenhouse gas problem in terms of understanding the carbon budget. The ocean is a key reservoir for carbon in the total Earth system and a fundamental bit of Leverage and understanding the Dynamics of both Coastal ocean circulation 50% of the world's population now lives within 50 kilometers of world Coastline. So understanding the oceanography of the coastal zones Is increasingly important and then on a third level the fundamental coupling of the ocean to the atmosphere that drives the entire climate and weather system. So I think those three factors converging together should maintain a solid emphasis in oceanography internationally. Thank you. Dr. Sullivan. Our next question is from Mary Loudon. Yes, dr. Sullivan. I was wondering if you could comment on any challenges or opportunities you've experienced or faced by being a woman in the astronaut or Space Program? Oh there have been a few. I think I got several miles down the road on the working on the important principle of ignorance is bliss. It kind of never occurred to me that there might be things. I should consider I shouldn't do if I found them interesting just because maybe women weren't supposed to be interested in those things. So I I was slow at making this connection that there might be a difference between what you were interested in and what you should do. I had been brought up to believe that if you were interested in something and mustard the capabilities to tackle it that was kind of all it took and anyone who could do those two things was entitled to jump in so that got me a long ways. I would have to say to NASA's credit and to the credit of the astronaut program. We've encountered many fewer and lower scale hurdles there than many women in other professional fields, and I think there are several reasons for that one is I think the confidence on everybody's part that the selection process wasn't compromised in any respect to bring women into the program helps. Lat secondly, we didn't exactly come in at the private first class or boot recruit level. When you enter the Space Program stamped on your forehead astronaut. It's a little more like walking into the services with a few stars on your shoulder and there were very amusing events in the first several years of watching people who worked a lot with astronauts always knew what astronauts looked like and what that meant always knew how you treated them and had never matched any of that with the word woman and now you're standing in front of them and you could kind of watch the brainwaves compete as they decided whether to treat you like, they thought they always treated girls or treat you like they thought they always treated astronauts because they suddenly realized those two had never been the same and there were some interesting times. They're mainly just colorful mainly amusing none of them in my opinion harassing or demeaning or certainly limiting in terms of what I was allowed to go do wish the world were always so but maybe we're continuing the change in that direction. Thank you. Our next question is from Greg Rita cell from North High School. Yes, being a since being a senior now is the time many of us make choices for college and stuff like that. What helped you in your college career and getting you in space. Well, when I was a senior, I made a choice that ended up having very little to do with where I ended up. So I met you have a better batting average than me. I had spent my high school electives on foreign languages. They happened to be easy for me. They're a lot of fun and I felt they would be good tools to be able to explore the planet with so off I went and I chose my college on the presumption. I would be a language and Linguistics major one thing that I can give you a piece of advice the first important thing in this that I learned when you go to college, you will meet people who are a whole lot smarter than you and they will have some advice for you on things that are important to take into learn and it's worth listening to those people. They told me that since I thought I was an Arts major I needed to go over here and take some science courses and those courses were the ones the courses and the professor's both are important ingredients. Those were the keys that reawaken my interest in the sciences and in the oceans and set me back off on a change of Majors the second lesson, I learned by accident on this circuitous route. Was it taking all my language electives that almost undercut the amount of science. I took in high school by too much. I was lucky. It didn't quite I was still able to change directions and fill back in my background in physics and calculus and chemistry Advanced chemistry, but it was probably only by a class or two in high school. If I hadn't had the level of preparation. I did in high school my ability to pick my direction and go my way in college would have been limited. So if you're still in high school or even in junior high Don't forget day-to-day the choices you make in school and what classes you take and how hard you work to get the most out of them those determine how robust your toolkit is. They determine how well you get to shape your future not how shaped it is for you. So I was very lucky in those two respects for work in the space program in the future. I would recommend that you not worried at all about a specific major or a certain school or a certain program named those are much less important build yourself a very solid background in physics and math in several of the other Sciences don't ignore reading and writing and literature the smartest person on two feet and the entire planet is not worth very much. If they can't express some of those ideas to other people and you never cease to see problems in the engineering community of people who cannot clearly Express what they're pursuing or how they're getting there. So you need to keep the balance. Thank you. Dr. Sullivan. We have time for a couple more questions Bob Froakie. We all know that the Hubble telescope was not a complete success two questions where there's some lesser successes and to your opinion as to how we can fix the lands. You know, I tried for the whole three years before we launched Hubble. I asked every time I had a chance if I could pull the cover up and lookin at the mirror and they would never let me do that. So now I go back and remind them that I would have spotted that form if they'd let me do that. I tell fibs a lot. Actually, I think Hubble I think the data shows that Hubble has been a very strong success with one important exception the sorts of performance in resolving objects and seeing far into the distance the kind of performance that was projected for the telescope has actually been met with the computer Corrections that we can apply to the images to strip away the consequences of the flaw in the mirror. We actually attain those resolution targets, but only on stars that are bright enough that we can throw some of the light away when we make the correction. So they've actually attained their performance targets but not on the dimmer objects that they hoped to be able to look at and seeing very faint Stars was an important performance category for Hubble. So that's been the key disappointment and shortcoming but the scientific benefits out of its capabilities applied to other targets has been tremendous. The repair plans call for mounting new instruments that have the optical Corrections built-in them into the telescope on orbit. We're not going to try to reshape the mirror fundamentally fix the problem itself. But you know, the bad news is we messed up the mirror and the good news is we did it very very accurately and so we can calculate the correction that's required and we can machine that correction and other Optical elements and install those in the telescope so that if it all goes as planned by about a year and a half from now, we should be attaining close to spec performance even on the fainter targets. Thank you. Dr. Sullivan. We have a question now from Carlton Wickstrom from North High School. Yes, ma'am. What the end of the Cold War do you feel that space missions that our national security interests are now a non important part of the Space Program. No, I don't think the world is quite as cut and dried as that colleague of mine who works defense and national security policies in Washington has done for several decades. I think put it very well when he was confirmed as the Director of Central Intelligence for mr. Clinton. He said ye verily we have slain the large Dragon the patrolled the forest now, however, we find that there's this unending array of smaller nasty snakes in the forest and in some respects keeping track of one big Viper was a whole lot easier. I don't believe the world is going to be a very idyllic and peaceful place anytime soon. I think the focus on one particular threat clearly has changed and our challenge is going to be adjust to adjust all of our means and methods to a much more difficult set of problems rather than one large very large and threatening problem. I think space assets will continue to play a role in helping us maintain the knowledge base in the information that we need. The relative role compared to other techniques May indeed have to shift but I don't think it will go to 0. Thank you. Dr. Sullivan. We have a last question here from Jim Kolbe a teacher at Washburn High School. Dr. Sullivan given the difficulty of modeling the chaos theory. Do you think we will ever be able to significantly improve our ability to predict Oceanic and Atmospheric events. That's a very good question. And and I do think there is a fundamental limit fundamental limit on some of the space and time scales do how well we will be able to predict some of those limitations can be circumvented by combining closer and measurements and shorten the time frame over which you attempt to predict. So instrumentation arrays like the Next Generation radar or local wind profilers can help a lot. The ocean of course is a fundamentally different fluid in the atmosphere and it's time and space scales are quite different and I think we're quite a long ways yet from the theoretical limitations imposed by non-linearity and Chaos with respect to the ocean. I thank you. Dr. Sullivan for joining us today for a most enjoyable and informative luncheon on behalf of Minnesota meeting. I'd like to present you the Minnesota meeting. Peace pipe created by Minnesota artist Robert Rose bear. The peace pipe is symbolic of the human bonds, which we must maintain in order to live together peacefully again. Thank you very much for joining.