Guest: Open Lines with Dr. David Livingston. Topics: Rachel Maddow statement, capitalism, company profits, space policy, Small Sat, STEM education. 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. Transcripts of Space Show programs are not permitted without prior written consent from The Space Show (even if for personal use) & are a violation of the Space Show copyright. Specific to this Open Lines discussion, we primarily talked about the recent statement by MSNBC Anchor Rachel Maddow. You can read her quote here: http://graceyu.tumblr.com/post/7949433063/we-didnt-put-a-man-on-the-moo…. I made it clear that we had to avoid partisan politics and that we were not going to praise or bash Ms. Maddow. Several listeners came right up to the line in their disagreement with her and a few times I had to pull back saying we were not going after her or her ideology. We had lots of calls and emails regarding her comments and almost all of them took strong issue with what Ms. Maddow said. Many listeners went into a discussion of defining a profit (I shared experiences on that re one of my graduate classes and a public multiple choice test), as well as strongly advocating capitalism in the marketplace. I did mention that Ms. Maddow seems genuinely enthusiastic and supportive of space based on the video clips a listener sent me from her show, but that her focus seemed to be on big government space programs. Ms. Maddow, her staff, along with someone from MSNBC were invited to appear on the program last night or to email in a clarification. I also asked to hear from listeners supporting her statement but neither took place. We had a good discussion space visionary leadership, something Ms. Maddow commented on in her statement. Other topics that we talked about included the Small Sat conference, some of what I learned about secondary payload capacity and concerns about the quantity of satellites ready to fly to get in on the now available flights. We also talked about my having met brilliant high school students at Small Sat working on cube sats with the peapod and being mentored by those from NASA and joining forces with college programs. The NASA people are volunteering their services so talk about altruism, there is much of it today in both the public and private space program. We also talked about doing away with the Space Act Agreement (SAA) in favor of some form of the FAR to more closely regulate and control commercial crew, etc. I mentioned an article sent me by a listener where the new director of the Russian space program said they had focused way too much on human spaceflight. Read the article here: www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-russia-space-chief-focus-missions.html. Finally, I mentioned the second Afghanistan article by recent guest Darren Rhyne: www.dau.mil/pubscats/ATL%20Docs/July-Aug11/DATL%20July-Aug11.pdf. One last thing and that is that the recent economic statements by Dr. Paul Krugman came up regarding the benefits of a possible fake ET attack on Earth in order to have an economic recovery. I took this as a joke & kidded around with Dr. Krugman's comments as I had also read them. This did give me a chance to promote a very cool movie out now, "Cowboys and Aliens." If you have not yet seen it, do see it. I'm pretty sure you will enjoy it. If you have comments or questions about this program, post them on the blog URL above.
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