Guest: Aggie Kobrin, Rod Pyle:  Topics:  The National Space Society, the ISDC (International Space Development Conference), business plan competition, Ad Astra magazine, Rod’s upcoming books, Aggie’s conference assessment post the pandemic.

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We welcomed both Aggie and Rod back to the show to discuss the upcoming ISDC 2022 event to be held at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City Hotel in Arlington, VA from May 27-29.  The theme of the event is “Living in Space.”

Aggie and Rod spent most of our time discussing ISDC, talking about the featured speakers and calling out a few per those mentioned in the tags though we went through the entire list on the ISDC website, https://isdc2022.nss.org/home/speakers.  Listeners offered comments about some of the speakers and I shared some Space Show stories with some of them.  When Fremont John called our guests, since he is representing TSS  at ISDC since I’m unavailable to go this year, I assigned him a few of the guests to get for Space Show interviews.  If you have people from the ISDC event you would like to hear on TSS, please post your suggestions on the blog.

Listeners also asked questions about the sessions, the panel discussions and in particular the sessions on settlement, solar power and the Moon.  A few wanted to know if they could still present at a session but as you heard from our guests, the agenda was close to being filled and only one session was still available.  Listen to find out which session still had room but was closing fast.

Other topics were the lunch speakers, registration rates and of course the student registration rate plus the student participatory programming at this year’s ISDC.  An additional topic looked forward to the fall for the Space Settlement Conference which as you will hear, will be a bit different this year.  Due to a question by Fremont John, Aggie explained how the invitation only event worked but did say if one wanted to attend to contact her.  Yet another topic was the nature of conferences, how most were going back to being in person but with a streaming component which Aggie was likely to survive post pandemic.  Thus going forward, conferences will be hybrids, a mix of virtual and in person.  A few words were mentioned about future ISDC programs, in particular their venues. In addition, our guests talked about the special Ad Astra edition coming out regarding ISDC.  A listener sent in a question about NSS and Ad Astra book reviews and if it was possible to do a book review for the publication.  Rod explained the process For

Unrelated to ISDC, Rod updated us on his next book project plus his new Planetary Evolution podcast.   

Please post comments/questions for our guests on the blog page for this show.  If you want to contact Aggie or Rod, you can do so through the blog or through me. For more on Rod’s book, check out his website, www.pylebooks.com.