Guest: Tom Hill was the guest for this Space Show program to discuss his Mars Society award winning proposal, Tethered Experiment for Mars inter-Planetary Operations Cubed (TEMPO3), a mission designed to demonstrate the generation of artificial gravity using a CubeSat satellite. Tom started the discussion with the basics pertaining to his winning this award at the recently held 2008 Mars Society Conference in Boulder, Colorado. Tom's proposal was the winner out of 30 proposals. During our conversation, he describes some of the other proposals and the process used by the Mars Society to select the winner of the contest. Tom received many questions about the cost and the financing/funding stream for the project. Part of the estimated $500K is to be paid by the Mars Society and part has to be raised by the TEMPO team. Tom explains this process in detail. We also talked about the launch costs, waiting longer for a free ride as do many in the academic world, and the team's use of volunteer labor. Tom explained the tether process in detail along with how and why this proposal works regarding artificial gravity. Listeners also asked Tom about educational outreach, using student involvement, and publishing the findings of the project once it is completed. You will want to hear what Tom has to say about all of this, especially how they are using educational outreach to secure more interest in the project. We also talked about the general public and its interest in going to Mars and what type of story or compelling reason might be given to "wow" the general public into opening up the purse strings for a manned Mars mission. Tom told us his story and this somehow brought us to discussing the use of the media and technology today, in the frontier days, and how things might have been different if CNN or Fox News had been on a covered wagon trip or the Donner Mission. While we had lots of fun with this discussion, it did point out that in our great exploration period, we did not have the type of litigious, environmental, PC, mommy society that we have now. I then asked Tom about his own desire to go to Mars and would he take his family and young children to Mars. This opened up an entirely different line of discussion for this program near the end of the 100 minute show. We got into the ethics of taking minor children to Mars, what Tom's wife might think about all of this, and you will hear some possibly surprising statements about it from Tom. It's an interesting and unexpected part of an excellent program. To get more information about TEMPO3, visit Tom's website: http://spacewhatnow . Check out the YouTube videos and the Design Reference link as well as the other links on this blog page. If you want to participate in donating to the project, there is a special link on the page, Mars Society Purchase Page, for contributions (www.marssociety.org/portal/purchaseList ). You can contact Tom Hill with your comments and questions at tomhill@marssociety.org .