Broadcast 617 (Special Edition)

Professor Haym Benaroya returned for this Space Show program. We began the discussion with Dr. Benaroya updating us on his upcoming conference, the Rutgers Symposium on Lunar Settlement, June 3-8, 2007 in New Brunswick, NJ (www.lunarbase.rutgers.edu). The professor highlighted the keynote speakers and talked about the conference format, goals, and objectives. In the second segment of the interview, we spoke mostly of lunar and space settlement engineering and technology. As a result of listener driven questions, Haym responded to concerns about the Vision and also about how to make space a civilian domain and market, not just a government dominated market between NASA and the DOD. Here, Haym addressed the engineering and technology needed, public-private partnerships that are best suited for this necessary development and more. In the third segment, we discussed the politics of space and the VSE. We discussed the importance of electing people to government that are supportive of the manned space program and our becoming a space-faring society. Dr. Benaroya urged listeners to write letters to their elected representatives, visit them whenever possible, even if you get stuck with a low level staffer in the local district office as they take note of what their voters are interested in and the more of us that make it crystal clear we are interested in space, the more likely they will pay attention to it and be supportive. In this last segment, we also discussed human factors and the fact that there seems to be an almost dark ages going on with the segment of human factors involving sex in space, reproduction and related topics. Examples were cited of the problem and we talked about the real uphill battle for settlement being to expand peoples minds to not be so puritanical in addressing these very important topics. You can send Dr. Benaroya your comments or additional questions and you can find out more about the coming Rutgers Symposium on Lunar Settlements by sending him e-mail at benaroya@email.rci.rutgers.edu.