Broadcast 1796 (Special Edition)

Guests: Dr. Madhu Thangalevu, Frankie Sharpe. Topics: USC Moon Studio space & architectural project planning and design. 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. We welcomed back Professor Madhu Thangalevu who was joined by Frankie Sharpe, one of the architectural graduate students in the USC Moon Studio program that just ended. Dr. Thangalevu started out by telling us about the USC School of Architecture program and their space studio classes including the Moon Studio, Space Studio, and the program with the engineering department for the Engineering Space Concepts Studio. Madhu then introduced us to Frankie Sharpe who talked about his lunar tourism project he did for the Moon Studio graduate class. You can see some of his slides for his project at http://cargocollective.com/frankiesharpedesign/Tour-the-Moon and http://uscmoonstudio.blogspot.com. In the process of Frankie telling us about his lunar tourism model, he talked about the learning process, the need to address engineering, cost, and human factors for his project, the solutions he developed for dealing with the new NASA guidelines for protecting and visiting the historical Apollo landing sites and more. You will see how he creatively used holographs for the visitor to experience the actual lunar landings, how radiation issues were resolved, and much more. I asked Frankie a series of questions about interest in his space work in the regular architectural firms has and is working for & you might be surprised by what he had to say. You will also find it interesting that prior to being given the opportunity to enroll in the Moon Studio, space was not on his graduate school agenda. In our second segment, Dr. Thangalevu talked about other USC space studio workshops and then we talked about space policy and the proper role for space in policy and our lives. Professor Thangalevu talked about large global space projects that involve people everywhere such as planetary defense and climate change research. We also talked about U.S. leadership in global space projects. One of his suggestions was to consider that it might be time for a U.S. Department of Space to deal with these issues but he did say a paradigm shift had to take place for space to be fully realized. He then introduced us to the cosmopolitanism concept. This led us to an interesting discussion about the space "elders" passing the torch to the younger generations for their leadership forward. During this discussion, we talked about the need to fail, to push to the design & function limits to failure so that something new & better comes from the lessons learned in the failure. Our last topics included suborbital space, producing nuclear fuel for propulsion on orbit, hydrogen from algae on orbit, a lunar super computer connected to the aging Deep Space Network, and space & spirituality. Please post your comments/questions on The Space Show blog. If you want to email our guests, do so through me & I will forward your email.