Dr. Jeff Foust was the guest for this Space Show program. We started the discussion by asking Jeff how one submits an article to The Space Review (www.thespacereview.com). After talking about The Space Review, we asked Jeff for his comments on the New Space 2007 conference he attended this past week. Jeff provided a with a day by day accounting of the programming, starting with Thursday which was a commercial-military space plane day. He brought us current with what is happening with Operationally Responsive Space, dual use technologies with the military and the commercial side and more. On Friday he told us about the business opportunities side of things, the business plan competition that was held and about space policy, risk management, and related fields. Listeners asked questions about informed consent and Jeff also told us about the talks by the NTSB regarding the accident investigation process. You will certainly want to hear what Jeff has to report on this conference session. As a result of a listener question, Jeff told us that the entrepreneurial space CEO's and executives were paying attention to these issues and even working these matters with an industry representative group, the Personal Spaceflight Federation. The final day of the conference was about frontier development and Jeff brought us up to date on the possible applications and development of space solar power for national defense and security. Again, don't miss his comments. As we left the overview of the conference, Jeff was asked about news events, the main being the announcement that Scaled Composites was being bought out by Northrop. We had listener input to this discussion by Tom Matula and Dave Huntsman by phone. This is an important discussion, don't miss it. Jeff was also asked about Rocketplane and the recent announcements that the company had lost its engineering team. Jeff responded by talking about the priorities for the company regarding COTS financing milestones with a $500 million payment due at the end of this month. Thus, company focus must be on the COTS program. One listener asked about the trend for the entrepreneurial companies to be taking more and more government money from the military or NASA and wondered if public-private partnerships for space development were growing and if the face of entrepreneurial space was changing. Jeff talked about the need to have R&D and technology paid for by a customer, even the government. This is also a must listen to part of this interview. If you have questions or comments for Dr. Jeff Foust, please send them to me at drspace@thespaceshow.com and I will forward them to Dr. Jeff Foust.
Guest
The Space Show
