Guest: Brian Horais. Topics: Secondary payloads, R& D and testing, EELV payload margins. Brian Horais was our guest today for this program. I suggest you read his recent Space Review article which was the basis for this program. You can find it at www.thespacereview.com/article/1489/1. In our first segment, Brian spoke about our space industry and its leadership challenges. He talked about risk taking, becoming too risk averse and the need for testing in space which is not done to a large degree because of the high costs and the risks involved.. The U.S. lack of innovation came up as did information on how foreign launch operations handle these issues. This brought us to the subject of secondary payloads on existing launchers and we learned that many of our EELV launches fly with excess margins because we have a mindset against secondary payloads. Brian told about the very successful Ariane ASAP program and suggested we need a program similar to it. In our second session, our guest talked about earlier programs for small payload launches, the RASCAL program for example, an F$ Phantom program, etc. A caller provided some information on his ideas in solving this problem. Brian also told us about his previous efforts to bring these issues to the attention of policy makers. Don't miss what he had to say about this. We talked about ESA and educational support as compared to NASA. In his Space Review article, Brian outlines several steps he believes would help improve the situation. We began discussing these steps at the beginning of the next segment. As we started the third segment, Brian went through his suggestions from Page 2 of his article. I suggest you read and review them. One of the ideas suggested was extensive research in the Van Allen Belts and this was discussed throughout both this and the next segment. You will want to hear this discussion. As we moved into the final segment, we talked more about testing and about the Ariane Vega small launcher program. A listener asked about suborbital as a path to orbital or a facilitator to orbital. Don't miss what our guest had to say about this. Brian repeated his message to get the word out and to keep working the issue so policy makers and businesses see the opportunity secondary payloads and low cost testing. If you want to send Brian Horais a question or comment, please use bhorais@comcast.net.
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