Issues

The prospects for international cooperation are hopeful, and with the restoration of the US program a new golden age may be in store.

In the next few years the USSR will send landing craft to Mars and its moon Phobos, place gamma‐ray and x‐ray observatories in Earth orbit and launch a 10‐meter radiotelescope as orbiting partner to an Earth‐based instrument for interferometry.

Successes such as Exosat and the Giotto Comet Halley flyby have led European notions to embark collectively and individually on an ambitious series of scientific space projects for the 1990s, and to back these projects with large budgets.

The US space program continues to gather data from scientific spacecraft and from airborne experiments, despite the 1986 shuttle catastrophe. NASA has laid out an ambitious research program for the next five to ten years.

The realization of the US scientific community's aspirations for research in space will likely depend on how several critical policy issues are resolved.