Rick Boozer is currently on The Space Show. He will discuss his new book, The Plundering of NASA: an Exposé, How pork barrel politics harm American spaceflight leadership, in which he presents the case that NASA’s SLS super heavy lifter project is a huge waste of taxpayer money and that space development and exploration with competitive commercial space transportation would be vastly more cost effective and would greatly accelerate progress in space.
Video: Spaceflight as It Was and as It Ought To Be
Rob Abiera points me to this video in which Andrew Lewis discusses his approach to space policy. More at Ayn Rand Institute eStore : Spaceflight as It Was—and as It Ought To Be: Reviewing 50 Years of Manned Spaceflight (MP3 download)
“Rocket Boys: the Musical” – on stage in West Virginia
I’ve posted here several times over the years about Rocket Boys the Musical, which is based on Homer Hickam‘s famous Rocket Boys book (later the movie October Skys) about his building and flying rockets as a youth in a small coal mining town in the post-Sputnik period. The musical still hasn’t made it to Broadway but it seems to be a regular production in West Virginia: ‘Rocket Boys’ set to begin run Thursday – The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia
It will play August 15-25 at the Theater West Virginia – Cliffside Amphitheatre. More at Rocket Boys: The Musical – Cliffside Amphitheatre
Find portions of the music here.
Satellite going to space with pop-art whimsy
The Scottish based company Clyde Space will be launching their first Cubesat in the near future. To highlight this milestone, they asked LA based artists Jon Gibson and Amanda White to create some artwork decoration. They took up the challenge and decided to engraved the side of the spacecraft so that it looks like “an oversized electrical charging device” : World’s first pop-art satellite headed to space – AP/Yahoo!.
“If someone is going to invade our planet, presumably they’re going to come in some sort of electronic, electricity-powered ship,” Gibson notes whimsically. “Maybe this will make them stop for a moment and say, ‘These guys are nice. We’re not going to destroy their planet.'”
This short video shows off the satellite side panel created by Gibson/White:
This is definitely not the first artwork to go into space, however. See the HobbySpace Art in Space section for several examples of art sent to space and created in space.
The Space Show this week
The guests on The Space Show this week:
1. Monday, August 12, 2013, 2-3:30 PM PDT (5-6:30 PM EDT, 4-5:30 PM CDT): We welcome RICK BOOZER, astrophysics researcher, public speaker and author, to the program to discuss his new book, The Plundering of NASA: an Exposé, How pork barrel politics harm American spaceflight leadership.
2. Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 7-8:30 PM PDT (10-11:30 PM EDT, 9-10:30 PM CDT): We welcome back DR. HAYM BENAROYA of Rutgers University to update us on more lunar engineering and habitat options, a discussion on the latest effort to promote Mars first as the Moon is only a digression, and much more.
3. Friday, August 16, 2013, 9:30-11 AM PDT (11:30- 1 PM CDT, 12:30PM-2:00 PM EDT): I will be uploading interviews from the Small Sat Conference. The interviews will be available today with listener access as soon as they appear on the website and our blog.
4. WEBINAR: SPECIAL TIME: Sunday, August 18, 2013, 1-3 PM PDT (4-6 PM EDT, 3-5 PM CDT). The topic of this webinar is “Near Earth Object (NEO) impacts and what’s being done to deal with the threat. ” Our panel of experts includes DR. RAY WILLIAMSON of the Secure World Foundation,DR. MARK BOSLOUGH who is a Caltech-trained experimental and computational physicist whose research interests range from nuclear explosions to climate change, and DR. TIMOTHY SPAHR, Director, Minor Planet Center Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. You can hear the audio as you would with any Space Show program. To view the live video stream, use our Space show UStream channel, www.ustream.tv/channel/the-space-show.
See also:
/– The Space Show on Vimeo – webinar videos
/– The Space Show’s Blog – summaries of interviews.
/– The Space Show Classroom Blog – tutorial programs
The Space Show is a project of the One Giant Leap Foundation.