This Week On The Space Show

The Space Show, hosted by David Livingston under www.TheSpaceShow.com, will have the following guests this week:

1. Monday, March 9, 2009, 2-3:30 PM PST (22-0:30 GMT)
Jim Funaro returns to tell us about the upcoming Contact Conference, April 3-5, 2009, NASA Ames. Jim Funaro is the Founder of CONTACT. Jim is a professor emeritus in anthropology at Cabrillo College, which has honored him with its highest award for teaching excellence. He has done field and laboratory work with monkeys and apes and with native peoples in Montana, Scotland, Italy and Greece. Publications demonstrating his research interests are “Anthropologists as Culture Designers for Offworld Colonies” and “On the Cultural Impact of Extraterrestrial Contact.” His personal and professional approach to life combines the sciences and the arts. Besides his graduate degrees in Anthropology, has a BA cum laude in Literature and is a published poet; he won the American Anthropological Association’s 1997 prize for poetry with “The Dancing Stones of Callanish.”

2. Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 7-8:30 PM PST (March 11, 3-4:30 GMT)
Sy Liebergot, author of “Apollo EECOM: Journey of a Lifetime,” returns to the show.
Sy Liebergot, author and NASA flight controller during the Apollo and post-Apollo years began his engineering career with North American Aviation in Downey, CA before graduating from California State University-Los Angeles with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1963. His space career began at North American at the very inception of the Apollo lunar program when he joined a newly formed Flight Operations Group. In 1964, he transferred to Houston, Texas as a member of the Flight Operations Group in support of NASA Mission Operations at the Manned Spacecraft Center, which had just opened. Mr. Liebergot switched over to NASA after about a year to qualify for a “front room” flight controller position in the mission control center in order to “get in on the action.” He became a veteran flight controller of many flights serving as Operations and Procedures Officer on AS-202, as Assistant Flight Director On AS-501 (the first Saturn V launch), and as EECOM (Electrical, Environmental, Consumables) Flight Controller on Apollo missions 8 – 15. Sy was the Lead EECOM Flight Controller for Apollo missions 12 – 15 and an EGIL (Skylab EECOM) for all of the Skylab program missions. On the international scene, he was the Lead EECOM for the American-Russian Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) mission. He contributed his experience to early shuttle missions and to the space station design. Sy was at the focal point of the crisis on Apollo 13 when the spacecraft oxygen tank exploded. He has advised and contributed to several books concerning Apollo 13 including the movie, Apollo 13; and was the technical adviser for an archival multi-media CD-ROM entitled Apollo 13, A Race Against Time, which is devoted to the Apollo 13 mission. He has appeared in the PBS NOVA series, the History Channel Modern Marvels, and the acclaimed Public Broadcast System documentary Apollo 13, To The Edge and Back. He served as the on-camera host for a space documentary entitled In the Shadow of the Moon, produced by the CBS affiliate in Austin, Texas. He recently has published his autobiography entitled Apollo EECOM: Journey Of A Lifetime. As part of the Apollo 13 Operations Team, Sy was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also received the NASA Commendation Award for his leadership role in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project international space mission. He has also been honored as Distinguished Alumnus of his alma mater’s School of Engineering and Technology. Mr. Liebergot is employed by Spacehab Inc. where, as a Senior Project Engineer, he has designed astronaut neutral buoyancy trainers for the International Space Station (ISS) and is presently a Senior ISS Configuration Management Analyst.

3. Friday, March 13, 2009, 9:30-11:30 AM PST (17:30-19:30 GMT)
Program goes to Africa with Oladunni Paul who will talk with us from Nigeria about space programs in Africa and much more. Oladunni Paul is a graduate of Geography from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. Mr. Paul has been involved in space activities in Africa for the last five years. He recently became the first Africa student to attend a World Space Conference in Japan. Mr. Paul has appeared on his country’s biggest and largest television station to talk about space. He based in Ibadan in the south western part of Nigeria. At present, Paul is working on a paper on public private partnerships in space development in Africa.

4. Sunday, March 15, 2009, 12-1:30 PM PST (20-21:30 GMT)
Dr. Paul Dear, founder and creator of the N-prize, returns. Dr. Paul Dear was born in Surrey, England – his mother’s American, and his father (now deceased) was English; he grew up in Hampshire (southern England). He did Natural Sciences (basically a mix of biology, chemistry and math) at Cambridge University, then did a PhD. in molecular biology at Oxford. He now works at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, which is a part of the UK Medical Research Council (a government-funded research organization, roughly equivalent to the NIH in the ‘States). The LMB is the lab where Crick and Watson discovered the DNA double helix, and the lab has about a dozen Nobel prizewinners. He currently leads a research team in genomics (DNA-based research) working on things ranging from cancer to ancient DNA (mammoths). He says “I’ve always been drawn towards physics and engineering, though I don’t have a degree in either. My attitude in general is that complex problems can be solved by a combination of naive optimism and ingenuity, rather than by money and big resources alone. The N-Prize started out as an idea of mine on the Halfbakery (www.halfbakery.com), a website where people bounce around crazy ideas. I posted the N-Prize there, initially as a hypothetical exercise. But, after some arguing back and forth, I figured it might actually be possible, so I put up the prize money and launched the website.

You can listen to the shows under www.TheSpaceShow.com
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