Guest: Rand Simberg, who blogs at Transterrestrial Musings (www.transterrestrial.com/), was the guest on the show. Rand recently wrote an article about the possible space policies from each of the three leading American presidential candidates and we wanted him to talk about his views on this subject right here on The Space Show. This was a comprehensive discussion on space policy, not just the possible policy of each of our presidential candidates, and you will find this information most valuable. The bottom line, according to Rand, is that for space, it won't make a huge difference regardless of who becomes president and certainly we should look to issues other than space exploration to help us decide to vote for one or the other candidate. We talked about Ares and the rocketry hardware chosen to take us to the moon, we spoke about going to the moon as a potentially thriving commercial program rather than a government program, and Rand told us why he thinks NASA and the current VSE might just become irrelevant. We discussed lobbying, how to influence members of congress about space, what might even be the best type of program we, as space enthusiasts, should consider requesting of our congressional members. Space solar power came up and you will want to hear what Rand says about it, both technically and economically. We spoke about engineering and education in response to a listener question about not finding engineering classes to study how to lower the cost of space access by building radically different launch vehicles. Please check out Rand Simberg's blog, Transterrestrial Musings at www.transterrestrial.com. If you have a comment or question for Rand, his email address is as posted on his blog, simberg@transterrestrial.com.
Guest
The Space Show
