Guest: Dennis Stone. Topics: World Space Week Association, COTS program, commercial space. We started our first segment with a welcome to Dennis Stone to The Space Show and began talking about the World Space Week Association and program. For more information about World Space Week, please visit www.worldspaceweek.org. World Space Week is always Oct. 4-10 and next year there will be Space Show programming in support of World Space Week. Mr. Stone took us through the organization's history and shared us with some of the highlights of this year's program plus recent years. It was interesting to learn that often the poorer nations or developing nations have more interest and space activities than the developed nations. We brainstorm for a while as to why that might be the case. What do you think? Mr. Stone also talked with us about various national space agency support of World Space Week. No surprises to learn that small nations seem to support World Space Week more than the space agencies of the larger nations. Dennis was asked about interest in space exploration, human spaceflight and science missions. Listen to what he said about the diversity of space interest among World Space Week participants. Dennis mentioned that in some cases World Space Week has actually helped to create a national space agency and space program in a specific country. As we started segment two, Dennis was asked if so many diverse space advocacy voices being expressed at different times throughout the year were helpful or would a larger unified voice be more effective. Don't miss his comments on this issue. About the middle of this segment, we switched to the topic of commercial space as Mr. Stone is the Manager of Program integration for NASA's Commercial Crew & Cargo Program. We talked at length about COTS and the COTS participants. We inquired about opening COTS up to a more beginning stage of commercial space company rather than only those companies that could fund themselves. Of course the Augustine Commission report came up and the drive to commercializing space access made much sense in our discussion. We talked about space being an investment in wealth building, not just an expense and Dennis frequently cited the early start of airmail as a role model. Microgravity came up during our commercial space discussion as did the biotech industry and space based manufacturing. As we started the third segment and while talking about microgravity, Dennis told us about a special website devoted to microgravity research. Please visit www.labflight.com. During this segment, we discussed commercial projects on the ISS and how to gain access to doing an ISS commercial project. Dennis directed us to the National Lab Program so if you are interested in that, please check it out. If you want to send a comment or question to Dennis Stone please use dstone@worldspaceweek.org or the COTS website, http://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home/.