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...And Promises to Keep

Dr. J. Stuart Fordyce, Deputy Director
NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio

Keynote Speech Delivered at The 27th Annual IECEC Conference
August 3, 1992
San Diego, CA

Good morning everyone.  It is indeed a great privilege to be here to address
you today.  As the keynote speaker, I feel that I should provide some ideas and
thoughts which you will keep in the back of your minds as you listen and
participate over the next few days.

I have chosen to title my address "...And Promises to Keep" which I am sure you
recognize as coming from Robert Frost's famous poem, Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening.  I hope after I have finished speaking, the thoughts that
prompted me to select that title will be understood.  I liken my address to the
poem because, like Frost, I cannot help but feel that we, you and I and the
country we so dearly love, have not kept our promises... promises made in
previous years, by us in the technical community and by our national leaders.

What were the promises?  Why did we not keep them?  And what shall we do about
it?  This is my theme.  In 1977, then President Jimmy Carter declared a "War
for Energy Independence" and we, the keepers of the energy grail said, "Yes, we
can"  Recall what we said we as a Nation would do.  I quote now from the
National Energy Plan of 1977 and the follow-up of 1979.  By 1985, we would
reduce our annual energy use growth rate to less than 2 percent per year.  We
were going to reduce our dependence on imported oil to one eighth of our total
energy consumption.  We were going to reduce gasoline consumption by 10
percent.  We were going to aggressively promote the development of new
technologies for renewable energy with an expectation of achieving near 20
percent of our domestic energy from renewables by the year 2000.  Two and one
half million homes in the U.S. were going to use solar energy by the year 1985.
We were going to reduce our energy consumption by 1/2 percent through
conservation.

Have we achieved any of these goals?  The results are mixed.  Some we did...
but most we did not.  Why not, you ask?  Well there are several reasons, but
the main reason is simply we, the technical community, didn't deliver.  We
didn't make the technological breakthroughs we promised.  We have been
successful at holding our annual energy demand growth to below the goal of 2
percent per year, primarily through conservation, BUT today, imported oil
accounts for 40 percent of our total energy consumption, and it's expected to
climb to 58 percent by the year 2010.  [These figures give reality to the
importance of Operation Desert Storm.]  Our gasoline consumption has decreased
by only 2 percent, despite the introduction of more fuel efficient  vehicles.
In 1991, we consumed an average of 16.7 million barrels of oil per day, up from
7.3 million barrels per day in 1976.  In 1990, renewable energy accounted for
only 8 percent of the energy consumed in the U.S.  Today less than 1 percent
(or less than 1 million homes) in the U.S. use solar energy.  We had promised
utility sized photovoltaic power systems and roof top residential systems.
Where are they?  We said by the mid 1990's, we would be producing
photovoltaically generated electricity at a cost of around 5 cents per
kilowatt-hour.  The actual cost, for terrestrial applications is still about an
order of magnitude higher today.

We are 1000 percent from our promise.  For wind systems, we promised
economically viable systems.  Without the benefit of legislative mandates and
tax incentives, these systems fall well short of viability.  Again we failed
our promise.  We said we could produce efficient, environmentally benign
electric vehicles.  Where are they?  We still don't have a good, affordable
electric vehicle battery and not much on the horizon even though a number of
you are working hard in that area.  We have fortunately begun to reassemble
teams for their development, but cycle life and energy density still remain the
challenge.  Perhaps variations on the nickel-hydrogen battery which is now
flying reliably in space systems can offer some reason for optimism.  No matter
that ideas like this were being worked 15 years ago.  We talked of modular fuel
cells for utility application, converting natural and/or coal derived gas
efficiently and cleanly for making electricity.

Did we deliver?  Are they commercially available?  Almost? What of nuclear
power?  Fusion reactors may well be the ultimate solution to all the world's
needs.  Are we closer or are we farther away?  This summer engineering work
began on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Program,
an international effort to achieve the long sought "break-even and ignition
points."  An exciting undertaking, but as Paul-Henri Rebut, the ITER Director
said, "If ITER fails, fusion will be delayed a half-century or more.  "And what
about hydrogen?   It was promised as the energy fuel of the future... clean,
abundant, non-polluting... to fuel our homes, factories, cars and airplanes.

We seem to have lost interest.  These are a few of the things we promised over
a decade and a half ago.  Like vote hungry politicians, we promised easy
solutions to hard, hard problems, and, perhaps like some of those candidates,
we didn't deliver! Not our fault you say?  "The marketplace didn't want these
solutions" or "The price of oil dropped and remains too cheap," you say, or
maybe it's because "our national political leadership abandoned the quest."
Then whose fault is it... Mr. and Mrs. American Citizen's?  No!  It is not
their doing, it is ours!  You, and yes me, the technical community dropped the
ball.  We gave up!  We lacked the will to lead and fight for the longer term
benefit when the tide turned, and we went off in other directions like
mercenary soldiers looking for the next war.  A lot of us who were in this army
seeking efficiency and energy independence (perhaps the community that holds
the long term viability of earth in its hands), found new tables to feed
from...  we changed our hats, embraced new goals and saluted new flags.  Do
I really blame you for this?  Of course not!

I am a realist too, as well as a sometimes hopeless romantic and optimistic
futurist.  The need to support graduate students, keep a healthy bottom line,
keep the tyranny of Wall Street at bay, and pay the bills made us, maybe
reluctantly, into a different kind of warrior.  How many kinds of warriors have
you been or will you be in your career?

How many times have we turned our backs on our former passions to seek new
relationships with some new and glitzy newcomer whose allure is measured by the
size of its purse? But has this been necessary?  Are you and I obligated to
forgo our beliefs and commitments?  Are we forever going to abrogate our
promises?  Are we forever going to let our dreams die, our technical expertise
wither, our passions cool?  That, my colleagues, is the crux of the real
question you need to address.

Let me rephrase it very simply.  Do we believe and care enough to do what is
right... what is right for our nations... what is right for our world?  I think
you and I have an obligation we have not delivered on.  We have an obligation
to our nations and to the world to provide leadership.  We have an obligation
to make the hard choices and propose and demand, yes demand solutions, even
difficult and unpopular ones.  In many ways we are at the junction in the path
that Frost talks about in another of his poems, The Road Not Taken.  In that
poem Frost talks of two paths in a woods and says, "I took the one less
traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

To draw the analogy, think of the path we have been traveling.  A journey begun
with a rousing sendoff at the start.  A sendoff characterized by national
pronouncements, brass bands, press conferences, lofty goals and national
commitments, and yes, even resources!  But after we had trod down the path for
a kilometer or two, the voices of the critics and the naysayers begin to
whisper from the dark woods through which we travel.  Soon the whispers grow to
an ebullient chorus, singing the critical song of discontent in an ever rising
crescendo.  You have heard their voices and the ever ringing echoes, the verses
of their songs becoming more and more petulant, more caustic, more negative.
These songs soon are joined by the brass instruments of those with other
agendas... those who see profit in stopping your journey so they can plunder
your carriage.  Soon we once again are debating the wisdom of the journey we
are on.

"Why," the chorus and band assembled shout, "are we doing this when we have so
many other urgent needs?  Why are we doing this when it is the responsibility
of others?   Why are we doing this when I could be using your carriage for MY
special journey to MY destination... one, they assert loudly, that offers far
greater reward than yours?"  And so we debate again, endlessly it seems.  What
is so interesting is that when we ask the same questions we asked previously,
we now get strikingly different answers to the same questions.  Now we have
plenty of oil... now we have plenty of natural gas... now we have plenty of
everything!  No need to do anything.

Let's move on to other more pressing priorities! So it goes, we start, we
travel a little way, and then we quit.  That is the path we are on my
colleagues, and this is a path that is well trodden by others before us...
their tracks visible in the clay of history.  Unlike Frost, we are taking the
path trodden by others...  a path well worn, littered with discarded
commitments, broken promises and decaying ideals.  Frost takes the path less
traveled.  That, I suggest to you, is what we should do as well.  Maybe we need
to take the path that is rocky and steep and not well lighted, and stay on our
path no matter how loud the whispers from the woods become, no matter how
bitter the environment, and no matter that the journey may be longer and
harsher than we first thought and no matter that hidden behind the rocks are
those who would ravage us and plunder our purses to fatten theirs.

Think of the journeys we have begun in the recent years.  I have already
mentioned the "War for Energy Independence."  Two decades ago we went to the
moon, not once but several times.  Why did we go?  Well, John Kennedy said it
so well:  "We go not because it is easy, we go because it is hard."  The keys
were leadership and commitment.  We had them then... we set tough goals, we met
the challenges, we overcame the setbacks.  We went to the moon and then
[pause]... and then we quit.  That is something people hundreds of years from
now will never understand.  We have now lost that capability.  We now are
farther away from being able to go to the moon than we were 25 years ago!
Remember the Solar Power Satellite concept?  With its huge solar collectors
orbiting the earth, beaming power down to an energy hungry world... a bold
concept, utilizing space for terrestrial needs.  Relegated to our bookshelves
or file cabinets now.  Why?  Was it too grand, too visionary, too hard?  [A
footnote: I have just returned from Japan at the International Space University
where 100 of the world's brightest young professionals from across the
technical, business and social disciplines in 29 countries are busy with a
comprehensive design project on all aspects of this concept...  There is hope!
These ideas will be kept alive in many countries.

Remember our attempt to build an American supersonic transport... again we
quit... it got too hard... the road was too long... the path too dark to see
clearly.  All these years later, we are starting over with a new supersonic
program, the High Speed Research Program.  So many years lost!  Where might we
be now if we had seen it through?  And what about hypersonic flight, broadly
supported or faltering?? Look back to this summer.  The superconducting
supercollider, an investment to penetrate the most fundamental properties of
matter, is near termination.  Another big start... another abandonment or
pulled from the fire?

How many of you know that NASA actually built and flight tested nuclear space
power systems in the late 1960's.  But we stopped, we quit, we gave up.   Now,
more than two decades later, we have to start over.  Will that be sustained? Do
you remember our commitment to eradicate poverty in America?  That journey has
been halted and in fact the travelers on that path have retreated... as the
echoes were too loud and the challenges allegedly too great.  What about our
goals of civil rights and true equality?  The wardens of distrust and bigotry
seem to have halted that journey.  How about the International Space Station
Freedom?   Boldly, we invest in the future to take a permanent habitat into
space using the first electric utility in orbit.  True to our recent history,
we repeatedly downsize and re-scope the effort, pairing the capability down to
the bone (at an even greater total cost by the way).

And now we talk of quitting and push it almost to the brink.  Not, my
colleagues and fellow citizens, atypical in our world today!  We are now
embarked on other national crusades.  In the United States, education, as it
should be, is in vogue right now.  We have an Education President and Education
Governors and Education Mayors and others.  We all know how vitally important
an educated citizenry is to our society.  We are, we are told, going to be
first in science and mathematics, assure that better than 95% of our children
graduate from high school, and assure functional levels of competence in the
basic skills.  Remember the Williamsburg Education Summit with its big press
conferences and media events, the pronouncements, the speeches, the trumpets
blasting that Wagnerian-like overture entitled a "New National Commitment."
Will we see this commitment through either?  Schools in both rural and urban
America are laying off teachers and staff, cutting programs as budgets are cut
and tax levies fail.  We even hear calls to challenge the public school system,
once the bedrock of the American culture, in favor of a network of private
schools.

History will cast its harsh light on that question and its answer will be part
of our legacy to those who will inherit our world.  American business has often
been criticized for being short sighted, for only looking at this quarter's
"bottom line."  We have seen advanced technology, often paid for by tax
dollars, abandoned to foreign competition by our business leaders because the
time frame was viewed as too long.  I am personally familiar with several
examples... one, developed to the state of potential commercial application by
the government, was pursued by an American company but then dropped when the
buyout barons arrived on the scene.  The Japanese are now pursuing its
commercialization feasibility.  Coal-based Integrated Gasification Combined
Cycle (IGCC) was developed and first demonstrated in this country in the
mid-1980's... but the first commercial prototype will be installed in the
Netherlands next year.  These are not uncommon stories and you each can add
your own vignettes I am sure.

The wisdom of establishing an American Industrial Policy (the politically
correct term) is evoking intense debate and whatever evolves may be a factor in
the way American business operates in the future.  It was once believed that
government had that special obligation to invest in our longer term needs... it
was acknowledged that major national commitments were often decades in
duration.  We once accepted and practiced that belief... but now the pressures
are intense for government to focus more and more on current needs and to
sacrifice the strategic investments in our future.  Like Mr. and Mrs.  American
citizen, our national bank account is being overdrawn so we can consume now
rather than invest for tomorrow... and the bill is being sent to our children.

"Please pay promptly," it will say, "or your privileges will be suspended."  A
question that begs to be asked: To whom will they make out the check?  I don't
know if you enjoy and read history like I do, but any examination of past
civilizations, in particular those that flourished and prospered, shows they
practiced boldness and commitment.

But history also shows that when doubts creep in and the whisperers begin to
have the ear of the leaders, when the naysayers' and the exploiters' voices are
so loud that their shrill drowns out the reason and rhetoric of the committed,
decline finds its point of entry and begins to fester in the timbers of the
society... that the pervasive fog of negativism blocks the light from reaching
into the debate, and as soon as the last flicker is extinguished, the cold
night swallows them forever.  Perhaps I am getting too philosophical here for
the keynote address to a technical conference... but I hope you bear with me
and don't take my admonitions for other than what they are intended to be... an
alert, if you will.  A clang or maybe in the words of a popular TV commercial,
"a Cha-Ching," a loud noise designed to get your attention... not to sell you
hamburgers, but to sell you a notion.  A notion that we must take a far
different path then the one we have been following.  We must because, my
colleagues, the path we are on is not getting us to grandmother's house, it is
the road to the wolf's lair!

It may be very appropriate to give time to these issues right now as we in the
U.S.  are embarking on our quadrennial presidential campaign season.  The
issues of leadership and national commitment ought to be on the menu of
discussion and debate.  And if the candidates are timid in discussing these
issues, we should demand their views and demand they share their solutions to
our crisis of commitment.  We should ask why we are afraid to be bold, why we
are afraid to make hard choices, why we are afraid to lead, why do we succumb
to the forces of negativism and doubt?

We have seen changes of profound and yes, epoch defining proportions in the
world in recent years.  Changes that the pen of history with its indelible ink,
will record and put into context.  But we react strangely to this new world.
We are simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic.  We rejoice in our successes
and then demean our motives.  We praise our technology but then damn it in the
next breath.  We clamor for more but deny our responsibility to pay and
persevere through the difficult times.  We stress the here and now, and ignore
the hereafter.  We ask for faster, better, cheaper but will not quench our
appetite for big and expensive.

In my mind there is no question about our abilities to find solutions... no
questions of our technological acumen... and no question about our needs.  The
only question is:  Are we going to take the path less traveled?  For my
colleagues that will  "make all the difference!" In this brave new world we
face, we must find new ways of doing our business.  We are going to be faced
with increasingly scarce resources in a time of increasingly severe problems,
not only in the energy arena, but in many aspects of our lives.  To enable us
to continue viable and productive research and technology programs, in order to
avoid quitting yet again in mid-journey, we the technical community must find
new economies, new approaches and new ways of "getting on with it."  In NASA
the words are "Faster, Better, Cheaper, Without Compromising Safety."

I think those words may be applicable here as well.  We must collaborate more,
share our ideas, share our facilities and yes, even our people.  To quote
Edzard Reuter, Chairman of the Board of Management at Daimler-Benz, talking
about future technologies, he says, "The technologies vital to our future can
be researched and developed only through global cooperation, which calls for
pioneering strategic business alliances unhindered by bloc mentalities... and
it will be not so much policy, as technologies and markets that will cross
borders and promote integration the world over."  That broad based technology
has been and will continue to be the engine of economic growth and the catalyst
for human progress is, I think, acknowledged by most of us.  However, as the
mathematicians say, "That is a necessary but not sufficient condition."  By
itself, technology will not assure success.  That team of horses that pulls
Robert Frost's sleigh along the path less taken, must pull together for the
common good on the journey.  Like a solitary horse, technology cannot pull the
sleigh alone.  It must work in harmony with others on the team... others with
names like leadership, government-private sector partnerships, national will,
environmental commitment, international cooperation, and social justice, to
pull us up the steeper hills.

As we follow the path, we will be guided by a combination of our intellect, our
training, our experience, our instincts, and the driver's gentle tugs.  Please
let us work together as colleagues to set the direction and keep our journeys,
once undertaken, on the path of progress, moving forward, regardless of the
steepness of the path or the whispers from the trees.  The generations that
will follow us depend, critically on you and me.  We must engage ourselves and
look beyond our perceived limits  of influence.  That is the legacy we should
leave... that is the duty we have.

I trust that the conference will provide you all the opportunity to discuss and
share, challenge and debate, define the problems and suggest the solutions.
Our obligations as technical leaders and innovators are real and of more
importance now than ever.  Thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning
and for your willingness to listen to me struggle with reality as a humanist,
and yes, still an optimist.  In closing, ponder the challenge, symbolic of
[Slide]: America at the Threshold and the poet's closing line:  "But I have
promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep..."

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