Guest:  Michael Ciancone:  Topics:  Foreword to Spaceflight" bibliography, 2019 IAC Washington, DC, Glenn Memorial Symposium, European Service Module for the Orion Program, service module integration, & more.

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We welcomed Michael Ciancone back to the program for this one segment 81 minute program discussing his early spaceflight bibliography through Sputnik in 1957 with a focus on Soviet Union early books.  We spent the first part of the first hour discussing books, especially the early ones from the 1900's with a focus on books from the Soviet Union.  This is a fascinating walk through spaceflight early history and some of it may very well surprise you.  We expanded the early history portion for additional spaceflight and space history books coming in post 1957.  For example, I mentioned how I was seeing more Apollo books than ever this year, probably because of the Apollo 11 50th anniversary.  Before moving on to other discussion topics, our guest mentioned the history committee sessions from the 2018 IAC program that was held in Bremen, Germany plus the history plans for the upcoming IAC 2019 event later this year in Washington, DC.  Michael then mentioned the inaugural Glenn Memorial Symposium that will be held this summer as he is on the event planning committee.  This will be a two day event which our guest spent time discussing. 

Listeners had several questions for our guest.  For example, Todd wanted to know if the Soviet Union books were in English.  Phil from Denver wanted to know if the early books were targeted for author peers or the general public of the time.  Linda from Spokane sent in a note wanting to know if there was a specific date or time period could be noted when serious books about humans to the Moon, not the early sci-fi books, started appearing.  Our guest suggested that there were several fantastic but not viable plans put forth in many early books but he said most likely the first one that was viable was from Von Braun and others, "Conquest of the Moon" in 1953.

Once again we switched topics, this time to talk about the European Service Module for Orion as our guest was and is the NASA safety and mission assurance lead for the project.  Michael said this was future history.  At this time he noted that he was an amateur historian as his day job was his engineering work at NASA and on the project.  Michael talked about the service module and the European partners such as ESA and Airbus plus the American partners in the project.  He discussed the EM1 mission coming up plus future missions, EM2, EM3 and more.  Additional topics continued to focus on international space missions, international engineering differences, increased costs from international missions, plus their benefits.

Ft. Worth John called wanting to compare the Apollo service module to the European service module. John and Michael had an interesting and detailed conversation  around this topic.  I jumped into the discussion to ask if subsequent service modules for future missions would be identical to the one that was now at the Cape undergoing integration.  This opened up another interesting discussion about evolving and improved design changes, adding in lessons learned and more.  Don't miss it.  Cultural differences were part of this discussion given the international involvement in the project.

We spent considerable time on the cultural aspect.  I asked how engineering might differ due to culture, including with China and Russian.  Note that the teams speak English but when it came to using the metric system or inches, things got a bit blurry.  Don't miss what our guest said about this. 

Marshall called after John wanting to discuss quality issues.   The laws of physics came as did different ways of doing things to go from Point A to Point B without violating the laws of physics but reflecting cultural and other different ways of doing things in different countries.  After Marshall called, a listener sent in a note asking if Michael had ever seen or used a slide rule for this work.  Her question was based on other Space Show programs where slide rules were mentioned.  Don't miss his answer.

Michael offered us a conclusion with a summary.  Don't miss it.  Please post your comments/questions on TSS blog for this show.  You can reach Michael through me.