Thomas O. Paine - National Commission On Space

National Commission On Space

In 1986, in the wake of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, Congress commissioned a panel of experts to investigate and evaluate the future the national space program. President Ronald Reagan appointed Dr. Paine to be the chairman this investigation. Rather than naming the commission after himself (which is customary) he chose, instead, to name it The National Commission on Space. Members of the 15-man commission included Dr. Luis Alvarez, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Neil Armstrong (a NASA astronaut and the First man on the Moon), Richard Feynman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill (an American physicist and space activist), Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan (a Space Shuttle astronaut and the first American woman to walk in space), and Brigadier General Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager .

Since leaving NASA fifteen years earlier, Dr. Paine had been a vocal spokesman for an expansive view of what should be done in space. The National Commission on Space took most of a year to prepare its report, largely because it solicited public input in hearings throughout the United States. The Commission report, Pioneering the Space Frontier, was published in May 1986. It espoused "a pioneering mission for 21st-century America... to lead the exploration and development of the space frontier, advancing science, technology, and enterprise, and building institutions and systems that make accessible vast new resources and support human settlements beyond Earth orbit, from the highlands of the Moon to the plains of Mars." The report also contained a "Declaration for Space" that included a rationale for exploring and settling the solar system and outlined a long-range space program for the United States.