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DISCUSSION 



Mr. FuQUA. Thank you very much. 



You were here when I asked some previous witnesses about 

 should there be a single agency that either coordinates all of this 

 or kind of plays the dominant role in international cooperation in 

 science. I think I know the answer, but I will let you give it. 



Mr. Pedersen. My own view is, speaking for NASA, that I think 

 our international cooperation programs have been extremely suc- 

 cessful, and as I said earlier, I think one of the reasons they have 

 been successful is that we do not approach them from the outset as 

 international programs. We look at them in terms first of NASA's 

 objectives and so on. 



I would be concerned that if there were, may I call it a super- 

 agency or some central point, that there would be a strong impetus 

 directed toward international cooperation for international cooper- 

 ation's sake, starting out with the presumption that things ought 

 to be done on an international basis. 



I have a very strong feeling in this regard that one of the 

 strengths of our program is that we don't start out that way. We 

 look at programs in terms of our interests. Our experience has 

 been, with some exceptions, which I will certainly acknowledge, 

 that we work very, very closely with most of the agencies in town. 

 In the Space Station agreements that we have just concluded, I 

 thought the relationship with State Department, with the White 

 House, with the Science Adviser's Office, with a number of agen- 

 cies around town, was extremely good. 



I think when you start to do something like that or propose that, 

 I think it's extremely important that someone work very hard in 

 defining what are the problems you are trying to solve, just exactly 

 what are the problems that such an agency would be designed to 

 solve, and what are some of the possible adverse consequences that 

 might fall out as a result of it. 



I am not sure that any single agency has the capability to make 

 the kinds of judgments and the kinds of decisions across the sweep- 

 ing range of scientific disciplines as the individual agencies can. I 

 think there is room for some improvement in coordination, particu- 

 larly true I think in some cases between State Department and the 

 program agencies. That is getting better, but as this committee 

 knows, it has not exactly been a model in past years. 



I think that setting up a superagency to correct something of 

 that nature, though, may be a remedy that is larger than the dis- 

 ease. 



Mr. FuQUA. What kinds of administrative problems do you run 

 into, such as tariffs, visas, proprietary rights to intellectual infor- 

 mation and so forth in these multinational cooperative projects? 



Mr. Pedersen. Quite frankly, again with one or two exceptions 

 which I will mention, this has not been a serious problem for us. I 

 have heard it has been serious in the case of other agencies in 

 some cases. We have not had serious problems, for example, with 

 visas as a matter of course. 



We had one — someday it will be a landmark, I suppose, for young 

 lawyers to look at — we had one problem, as you know, with the 

 question of bringing Spacelab into the country because Customs 



