Guest: William Grahame was the guest for this Space Show program to discuss hypersonic R&D, programs, and flight. We began the discussion with a short summary of some of the existing or better known hypersonic and scramjet programs including Hi-Fire, Blackswift, and Falcon. We talked about development of these vehicles needing to come from the military side of things, not civil or the private sector. We also talked about educating the public as to why hypersonic vehicles are important and how the press is probably not that aware of their importance.

Guests: Richard Garriott and Starr Long were the guests for this very special Space Show program. Mr. Garriott was with us from Star City, Russia where he is currently training for his Soyuz launch to the ISS on Oct. 12, 2008. Starr Long joined us from Seattle, Washington. During this program, Mr. Garriott explained why he wanted to go to space and the ISS, his experiments that he will be performing, and his interactive participant program for those of us here, Operation Immortality (please visit www.operationimmortality for more information).

Guest: Dr. George Nield, Associate Administrator for the FAA Office of Commercial Spaceflight, was the guest for this program. Please note that there is audio noise on this recording coming from the hotel phone line. I apologize that a better quality connection was not available. We began our discussion with a tribute to Apollo 11 landing on the Moon given today being July 20. Dr. Nield gave us a good overview and comparison of the evolution of aviation as compared to the evolution of spaceflight. You will not want to miss this part of our discussion.

Dennis Wingo returned to the program to discuss the importance of space vision, politics, national security, and the politics of limitation and reduced technology. This program provides listeners with a thorough analysis of the importance of space in supporting the future of humanity. Its largely a big picture vision program though we did talk about specific projects and subjects. For example, Dennis explained why from his analysis, low cost access to LEO is not that important in furthering space commerce.

Dr. Harvey Wichman was the guest for this special Space Show program. As Dr. Wichman is an expert in human factors for space travel, suborbital as well as orbital, plus since he is the director of the Aerospace Psychology Lab at Claremont McKenna College having done various human experiments simulating space flight and cabin condition, we spent a significant amount of time discussing the wide range of factors that can and do impact people in space. Dr. Wichman was superb at breaking down what factors concern suborbital, orbital, and long term space flight.