Atlas 5

Guests: Josh Hopkins; Larry Price; Steve Harrington. Topics: Near Earth Asteroids, Orion Crew Capsule, space policy, aerospace engineering, academics, turbo pumps, pistonless pumps. This Space Show program consists of three interviews back to back separated by about ten plus seconds of silence. Josh Hopkins was interviewed on Tuesday, August 31, Larry Price was interviewed on Wednesday, Sept. 1, and Steve Harrington was interviewed on Thursday, Sept. 2. As you will hear, the Harrington interview was a change of pace and topic discussion from the first two interviews.

Guest: Jim Muncy. Topics: Administration's space policy proposal, commercial space. Jim Muncy was our guest for this 90 minute program without a break to discuss the Administration's new space policy proposal. Jim started the discussion saying that the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF) strongly supported the administration policy and that he wanted to help explain the program to us. He said the plan was for opening the space frontier as opposed to the continuation of a centrally planned government directed program.

Guest: Edward McCullough. Topics: Advanced technology, launch vehicles, space and lunar solar power. As we started our first segment of tonight's program, we focused on launch vehicles and Ed said up front that the launch vehicle companies must be profitable. With insufficient flights and fewer and fewer flights, it's hard for them to be profitable but were we to build and deploy a space solar power system, that would change things.

Guest: Ross Tierney. Topics: Direct 3.0, heavy lift, Ares 1, Ares V. Ross Tierney was our guest to update us on progress with the Direct alternative to the costly Ares 1 and Ares V launchers. We referenced several websites during this program and here are the web links to what we mentioned. First, for the DIRECT discussion thread at the nasaspaceflight forum, please use http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=17295.msg415258;topics….

Shubber Ali was the guest on this special program and we thank Shubber for being with us live at the unheard of time of 2:30-4:30AM in Sydney, Australia! During the first part of this program, Shubber talked about space tragic and why he does not like the term "space industry." We then looked at recent developments in the space world since his last appearance on the show and asked for his analysis. This included CEV, COTS, Lockheed, Kistler, Atlas 5, Bigelow, space tourism and Ms. Ansari on the space station, the VSE and more.

Mark Whittington returned for this special year end and New Years Space Show program. Our discussion with Mr. Whittington covered many topics including the RTM mission planning, hardware, and architecture, on orbit construction, heavy lift and the economics of multiple launches versus heavy lift. We discussed the proposed merger of the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 EELV's with Mr. Whittington suggesting the merger was not in the best interest of the nation and the established as well as developing launch industry.