Guests: Cliff McMurray, Bart Leahy. Topics: ISDC 2011 Conference, space advocacy, space policy, space networking. Please note that you are invited to comment, ask questions, and discuss the Space Show program/guest(s) on the Space Show blog, http://thespaceshow.wordpress.com. Comments, questions, and any discussion must be relevant and applicable to Space Show programming. We welcomed both Cliff McMurray and Bart Leahy to the program to discuss the 2011 ISDC Conference to be held in Huntsville, AL May 18-22, 2011. For more information, registration, hotel, and even abstract submissions, visit www.isdc2011.org. While our discussion unfolded in the typical three segments, this summary will simply reflect the ISDC content, conference details, and specialty items discussed throughout all segments of our discussion. The theme for this year's ISDC Conference is "From The Ground Up." During the first part of our discussion, Bart Leahy who is this year's conference chairman, took us through the conference and location logistics, registration issues and some of the tours. He also talked about the Space Investment Summit that takes place the day before the conference at the same hotel but with a separate registration. Bart then told about many of the featured and keynote speakers plus we talked about some of the more important and public topics such as heavy lift which is addressed in the Space Launch Systems track. One of our listeners asked our guests to tell us how NSS differed from other NewSpace organizations and conferences and referenced the Space Frontier Foundation. Both of our guests responded to Paul's email question. We discussed the various tours offered to those attending the conference. We talked about the impressive business park in Huntsville that is home to many aerospace industry companies, the tour of the NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center, the University of Alabama Huntsville propulsion engineering and research department, and our guests even mentioned the possibility that some attending ISDC might want to visit the home of Jack Daniels located in nearby Lynchburg, TN. Many questions came in about submitting abstracts and as you will hear, there is still time to do so though a few of the tracks are already filled. Later, we also learned that there would be an organized tour of United Launch Alliance (ULA) in nearby Decatur, AL. Listen for details for admission to the tour as you need to be a U.S. citizen for this tour. Our two guests spent a good portion of the program discussing the outstanding networking that results from attending an ISDC conference and we spent some time going through various tracks and why they were the favorite of our guests. As you will hear, the three of us had lots of fun during this discussion and as we all pointed out, not only is ISDC chocked full of information, facts, and networking opportunities, it is also lots of fun as represented by our discussion during this program. Later, we returned to the Space Investment Summit program as our guests wanted to say more about it. I also asked Cliff to tell us about his new business, Antares Enterprises LLC. If you would like to comment or ask questions about this program, please post them on the blog. For conference information, you can use the contact information on the ISDC website. You can also email Cliff McMurray at cliff@antaresenterprises.com. Bart Leahy can be contacted using isdc2011.chair@nss.org.
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