Guest: Open Lines with Dr. David Livingston. Topics: Launch costs, spy satellites, launch reliability, & much more. Please direct all comments and questions regarding Space Show programs/guest(s) to the Space Show blog, http://thespaceshow.wordpress.com. Comments and questions should be relevant to the specific Space Show program. Written Transcripts of Space Show programs are a violation of our copyright and are not permitted without prior written consent, even if for your own use. We do not permit the commercial use of Space Show programs or any part thereof, nor do we permit editing, YouTube clips, or clips placed on other private channels & websites. Space Show programs can be quoted, but the quote must be cited or referenced using the proper citation format. Contact The Space Show for further information. In addition, please remember that your Amazon purchases can help support The Space Show/OGLF. See www.onegiantleapfoundation.org/amazon.htm. For those listening to archives using live365.com and rating the programs, please email me as to why you assign a specific rating to the show. This will help me bring better programming to the audience. Welcome to our primary March Open Lines discussion. During the first segment of this two hour program, we followed up from Monday with Tony talking about electric cars, SpaceX, Elon Musk, solar power, PGE electricity rates and more. He also mentioned that Facebook bought out Titan Aerospace, a company that makes a solar airplane. Later in the program, Tony emailed the news that former Skylab astronaut & Korean War Vet William (Bill) Pogue passed away. Bill was twice a guest on TSS & a friend. He will missed and we dedicated tonight's program to his memory. After the initial call with Tony, Jerry called from Florida to talk about the Ukraine & the space connection, the 2015 NASA budget, and possible Antares problems due to the Ukrainian connection. Next, Dwayne called to talk about what it takes to launch sensitive and very expensive USAF spy satellites. He talked about launch reliability as being more important than the launch costs. He associated this with the high costs of ULA launches and then we talked about what it would take for SpaceX to compete in that market. It does appear that SpaceX is ready to compete per some of the articles that were sent me during the discussion. Dwayne pointed out the series of Titan failures in the mid to late 90's, & how this led to more oversight and quality control to make sure the satellites got to orbit. In the second segment, Tim from N. California called and talked about computer power today making it possible to a SimNASA type venture to refine the NASA budget process, even the overall government budget. He mentioned a project decades ago, World Games by Buckminster Fuller but back then the computer power was not what is today. Here we also talked about Big Data. Dwayne called back, I asked him for news on the Chinese lunar rover and we talked about the Atlas Russian engine, the RD-180. Dwayne attended hearings last week on Inspiration Mars and reported to us on those hearings. Doug emailed in wanting to know the number of ULA engine flights as compared to SpaceX engine flights. Please post comments/questions on TSS blog above. You can reach any of the participants in tonight's show through me.
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