Broadcast 926 (Special Edition)

Guests: Dr. Jim Pass, Dr. Al Harrison, and Tom Gangale were the guests for today's Space Show program to discuss astrosociology and the social science role in space education as well as space development. We started our discussion with an update from Jim, Al, and Tom about their panel discussion at the recent Contact Conference, "Astrosociology and 21st Century Space Exploration." You will not want to miss this comprehensive, far reaching, and important discussion. Listeners asked our guests many questions about the social sciences as part of space education and its competition with the hard sciences and engineering. There was much give and take during this discussion and some in-depth soul searching from our guests as well as from listeners. Clearly, we got the sense that there is demand for the social science education in space studies, even a PhD degree program, but for various reasons, the academic support is not there. Later in the program, a listener brought up the probable space policy of one of our presidential candidates. Our guests responded to the listener's question and I altered the perspective by saying that we, in the space community who know better, are simply not doing a good job of communicating real space to the public, let alone Congress. This provided a vibrant discussion on this issue. You can send each of our guests follow-up question or comment using the following email addresses: jpass@astrosociology.com; aaharrison@ucdavis.edu; and teg@ops-alaska.com. In addition, Dr. Pass has an excellent astrosociology website, compete with research papers, and a wealth of information on this subject. Check it out at www.astrosociology.com. Dr. Al Harrison has a relatively new book out that all of you should read, "Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science, Religion, and Folklore." Tom Gangale has a book out that might interest you on how to improve, even save our political system and presidential election process, "From the Primaries to the Polls: How to Repair America's Broken Presidential Nomination Process."