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Nov. 13, 1997 - Art Bell
03:25:03
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Gene Meyers - Commerce In Space
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the great American Southwest. I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may
be across this great land of ours and beyond.
Way, way beyond, in fact, from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands in the, uh, in the West.
Well, West, actually.
All the way east to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands.
South into South America.
North to the Poland.
Worldwide on the Internet.
This is Coast to Coast AM and I'm Art Bell.
Great to be here.
A Thursday night, Friday morning show, depending on where you are.
And I've got another cruise to tell you about.
No, not really.
But, yes, can you imagine, instead of booking a cruise on Holland America Lines or Princess or whatever, to the Caribbean or, you know, to your favorite spot in the world, suppose you were able to book a cruise in orbit.
That's right.
I said in orbit, in space.
Well, I've got the man with the idea.
He is an associate, a friend, actually, of David Adair, who, incidentally, is going to be on Monday night, Tuesday morning, this coming.
He is Gene Myers, and he's going to tell us why he thinks, and how he thinks, exactly that might be possible.
As a matter of fact, check this out, folks.
Some major U.S.
cruise lines are actually behind the idea.
They know how to do it.
They know how to make it financially feasible, and we're going to tell you all about it tonight.
But imagine that, booking a cruise, not to the Caribbean or some likely spot here on Earth, but try and imagine booking a cruise, that would be fun, to orbit and to a giant tourist-oriented space station.
It sounds like a wild and wooly idea, doesn't it?
Expensive, outrageous, impossible.
Oh no, not according to Gene Myers.
And so, we will talk with Gene Myers in a few moments.
Let me review the pathetic state of the worldly news out there.
I watched our half-dozen UN inspectors, American version of the UN inspectors, about half-dozen of them, get ejected from Iraq in the middle of the night.
Unceremoniously given six hours to get out of the country or else, and they did.
Now, the rest of the UN inspectors in protest, or one might say in solidarity, have also walked out.
Now, the situation appears to be deteriorating with Iraq.
And it seems like we are being groomed for some sort of confrontation once again with Iraq.
And I must tell you, I have become somewhat cynical with regard to our intent to really ever do anything specific and final with Iraq.
I think we're not going to do it.
I think it's a bunch of baloney.
I think that without other countries' approval, though an earlier president might have done it, That there is a zero and no chance that we will hit Iraq militarily unless, of course, we get one of our U-2s low enough to give them a shot at it.
Now, we intend to fly more U-2 missions over Iraq.
The U-2 is fully capable of staying as far away from Uh, their, their, their ground, uh, ability to bring down an airplane, whatever it might be, as it needs to.
So, if a U-2 gets in the way of one of its missiles, or the other way around, it will only be because we decided to, in effect, allow it to occur so that we could have an excuse to, uh, commit violence, uh, in Iraq.
And even then, it will be cruise missile violence.
And I consider it very, very unlikely, short of a shot at one of our planes.
And the U.N.
Security Council is issuing edict after edict, which I'm sure just has Saddam Hussein absolutely quaking in his boots.
What a joke.
What a complete joke, as far as I'm concerned.
So, Right now, there are no teeth, there's a lot of roaring, there's a lot of saber rattling, but nobody is going to use the saber.
That's my assessment, short of a shot being taken, that is, out of you two, of course.
Otherwise, let me see what's going on.
Dr. Kevorkian has done it again, a 74-year-old woman, this time.
She had liver cancer.
And has died with Kevorkian's assistance.
Carbon monoxide.
Investigation of the death ongoing.
Thoughts are plummeting again in Tokyo, down, I understand, the Nikkei at this hour, about 3%.
So that's the news, such as it is, and the only interesting news, or almost interesting, is Iraq.
If anything really was going to happen, or if I even thought anything interesting was going to happen, we'd be covering that, but I frankly don't.
I think it's bluster and baloney.
Bluster and baloney.
And we're not ever really going to do anything about Saddam Hussein.
Our apparent intent is to just keep him down enough, but not too far.
And it's just, it's an incredibly frustrating situation.
All right, Gary Myers coming up.
Gene Myers, I should say, coming up in just a moment.
That one.
All right, now here is Gene Myers, which is a rather loosely knit group of engineers, writers, educators, and architects who are aggressively bringing the space tourism, tourism I said, and space manufacturing potential Of the concept you're about to hear about, to the attention of American corporations, and tonight to your attention.
So here is Gene Myers.
Gene, welcome to the program.
Glad to be here, Art.
Gene, this is pretty wild stuff.
You're actually talking about space tourism, if I understand all of this correctly, and the possibility of as many as, say, 300?
Three hundred tourists going to space at any given moment.
Is that roughly accurate?
Yes, it is.
It is.
And the fact that it sounds like such a futuristic, you know, difficult to obtain idea to me is Sort of a tribute to the way NASA has downplayed the expectations for the space program over the last 20 years.
Well, let me tell you what we've got now.
We've got MIRROR up there, which is, or appears to be, an experiment in the limits of mortal terror for human beings.
And it is a little bitty place where guys have to just sort of squidgy around to barely even move.
So it seems like, and that's very expensive, causing the Russian government to go broke, Then you look at our own space station effort as part of the consortium.
The U.S., I think, originally estimated it would invest about $8 billion to get the space station up.
That number has escalated now to, I understand, in excess of $80 billion and is on the way up from there.
And that's just to get a space station that will handle, I don't know, 7, 10 astronauts, whatever, at a time.
You're talking about 300.
You've got a lot of explaining to do.
How could we possibly get that many people to space?
Well, the idea actually was first generated back in the early 70s when Rockwell International and NASA and a couple of the other aerospace companies started designing the Space Shuttle.
And it centers on the Space Shuttle's external tank.
That's that big orange cylinder that you see attached to its belly when it sits on the launch pad.
Right.
That cylinder is about as big as a 747 fuselage, and I'm sure even if some of the audience hasn't flown in one, they've certainly seen them on TV commercials and watched the President walking down out of Air Force One, which was a 747.
So you get a good sense of the size of this thing.
It's hollow, and it's actually carried all the way up into space now.
It's full of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel, two odorless liquefied gases that fuel the shuttles engines all the way up to to orbit.
The two little rocket boosters under the wings drop off two minutes after launch and they parachute back and they're fished out of the ocean and cleaned up and reused.
But the shuttle and the external tank stay attached to each other until they they climb about 98 or 99 percent of the way to orbit.
Then the external tank is, when it's nearly empty, it's released And the shuttle actually makes a little dip in its orbit to force it back down into the atmosphere.
And about an hour after launch, the external tank comes back into the atmosphere off the coast of Hawaii, actually between Hawaii and California.
And it has no parachutes, it has no retro rockets, it has no guidance of its own.
It's kerplunk.
Yeah, so it actually bursts into flame.
The Air Force has taken some pretty dramatic footage of what this thing looks like as it's coming back.
It looks just like a meteor, bursting into flame, breaking up into pieces, and hitting the ocean at 12, 15,000 miles an hour, and it shatters and falls to the bottom of the sea.
Piece of junk.
Right.
So when they were designing the shuttles back in the mid-70s, early mid-70s, the engineers looked at this thing and they said, geez, it's so big and it's hollow and the fuel that it's holding is odorless.
It's not kerosene or something that would sort of sink into the walls.
They said, why don't we leave these things in orbit when they're empty?
And join a dozen of them together into a rigid ring that really looks very much like the space station in the movie 2001 or the station in the current Deep Space Nine television show.
So if you put a dozen of these things in a ring, you'd be able to divide it up into three decks, just like a 747 is up by its nose, you know, where it has three floors.
So you would have a dozen 747s?
You'd have, in effect, a dozen 747s Sort of welded into a circle.
It wouldn't quite be welded, but you could picture it that way.
Sure.
And it'd be a rigid ring.
You'd have two more of these external tanks going through the center of this wheel, the way an axle goes through a wheel.
And then you'd have between four and eight spokes that ran from the center, these two central external tanks, out to the ring itself.
So the ring would slowly rotate.
uh... one or two are revolutions per minute and the central column
uh... would be uh... broken up into cabins that would be uh...
zero g cabins for for the tourism industry
so if you lived out in the ring or if you if you say spent the night out in the ring
you would have artificial gravity Right, you would.
And depending on the speed it rotated at, it would probably, if it rotated at 1 RPM, you'd have about half normal gravity.
That would be enough to give tourists a sense of something very different and unusual, but it would be enough gravity to let showers and toilets and food preparation stuff work.
Wow.
And then they could go up these spokes to the central portion.
Gene, may I ask a question?
Why haven't they done that anyway?
Uh, in other words, with regard to, uh, Mir was early, but our planned space station, uh, whatever might come in the future, I always wondered about that.
I mean, you could produce artificial gravity in the way you just suggested.
Uh, why haven't they done that?
Well, as far as we can tell, and, you know, the guys at NASA that made this decision are not real proud of it, But in the 70s, when it was first proposed, NASA's budget was being cut pretty badly.
That was at the end of the Nixon and through the Ford and the...
Carter administration, and they really didn't have enough money to finish designing the space shuttle the way they wanted to.
That's one reason it's so expensive and complicated to operate.
They didn't put enough development money into the front end of it.
Right.
So they've got this big operation money.
So when the engineers were pitching it to NASA, NASA said, well, geez, you know, we don't have enough for the engines now.
And you would have to design, really not design, but add smaller versions of the shuttle engines onto the tanks to keep them in orbit.
But the engineers had worked all that out, how you could do it with pretty cheap components.
You wouldn't have to develop any new engines or new guidance system or anything.
You just have to attach a couple of pieces to this thing so it would move around.
So they ran out of money.
Then, in the early 80s, when the shuttles began flying, NASA realized they had to justify the shuttles now because, you know, it was a very expensive project.
It was sold as a space truck, but it didn't haul anything anywhere.
So they realized they needed a space station.
And they also had to justify the interior cargo space of the shuttle, which was bigger than was really necessary to haul most of the satellites up.
So they started designing this small freedom station that was made up of a bunch of small cylinders that would fit inside the cargo bay, which has about a 12-foot diameter.
So part of it was to justify the The use of the shuttle, the reason they picked this very peculiar, very small, original Freedom space station design.
But the other thing was that NASA, you know, they're engineers.
They're not sales people.
They don't understand marketing.
They did apparently in the late 70s go to a couple of big private companies and ask them if they'd be interested in leasing portions of one of these big ring stations.
And the company said, well, what would we get out of it?
And the NASA engineers started talking about the kind of thing David Adair talked about.
The materials, the new alloys you could produce in space, the dramatic pharmaceuticals that could come out of this, and how it could beat the alloys, the metals in particular, could be something that no other nation on Earth could duplicate, because you could only make these things under partial or zero gravity conditions.
But the companies in the late 70s and even the early 80s They didn't believe that there would ever be overseas competition.
They didn't think that the Europeans and the Japanese and all of that would actually, you know, be able to take over the American auto industry and some of these others.
So they got shot down on that front.
And then when they went to the scientists and researchers, the scientists said, oh, geez, that thing is way too big for what we need.
The thing is, we only need a small, almost something like a small yacht for the little experiments we want to do.
A big ring station like that is, you know, it would be like the Queen Mary for us.
So they convinced NASA that they only needed something small, not something as big and dramatic as this.
And also remember, at that time, they hadn't tested the shuttles very well.
They flew four or five flights by 1984.
Right.
So the tourism industry would, you know, they wanted to know the costs, they wanted to know how you would get the people up and back.
There actually were designs back then for a passenger compartment that would fit in the cargo bay.
It could carry 84 passengers at one time.
Really?
Really.
I saw the designs for it over at the Rockwell plant in Downey, California.
It was a dramatic little piece of work, considering that the flight only takes eight and a half minutes to get to orbit and then you'd be dancing around for about an hour docking with wherever you're going to dock.
Well, you didn't even really need peanuts.
There was no long-term requirements to keep the passengers happy for hours.
So, let me understand.
The shuttle could conceivably carry 84 at a time up and down.
Right.
The shuttle could be produced, you believe, in a private sector for about how much?
Well, the shuttles that NASA bought were really prototypes.
They were over-engineered, which they had to be because nobody had ever done this before.
They cost NASA between $2 and $2.5 billion each.
That's a huge amount.
A 747 fully outfitted costs about $150 million for comparison.
Our battleship costs, I think, about $4.5 billion, a full-blown Navy battleship.
So it's a huge amount of money.
The Rockwell engineers that I've spoken with over the last few years feel that if private
industry went in with a bag of money and asked Rockwell, which is now owned by Boeing, to
build these commercial versions, these second-generation, improved versions.
Right.
They could be built for about $500 million each.
You're kidding.
No, I'm not.
$500 million?
Well, let me tell you something I know about.
I know a little bit about cruising.
I've done a lot of cruising.
You know, the average cruise ship, a luxury cruise ship, can cost $500, $600 million.
Yes, that's right.
That is right.
And so it would be kind of in line with what the cost of a cruise ship might be.
And it would be reusable.
And I'm beginning to get what you're talking about here.
All right, stand by, Gene.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Gene Myers is my guest.
And we're going to talk about why you would want to go up and be a tourist in orbit.
And that's pretty interesting stuff.
Coming up next.
You can read.
To realize.
The.
The.
Thank you for watching.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Alright, I'm about to take a moment to explain to you a new product.
you And I'm going to tell you why we've got this product and how utterly, totally cool this product is.
You have to understand that a lot of times when we end up getting a new product for the Z-Grain Company, you only hear about it after The idea has been born.
The products have been investigated and tested.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
It takes a long time.
And so tonight is a culmination of a lot of work, frankly.
And what I'm about to tell you about is so cool that you better turn the radio up and listen for a minute.
Here's how it happened.
As you know, I seem to have turned into something of a celebrity.
And believe me, for all of you who think it's fun to be a celebrity, it's not as much fun as you might imagine a lot of times.
Believe me, it isn't.
I'm not one who really craves being a celebrity.
Anyway, such is life.
And some other time we'll talk about that, because it's kind of interesting in a lot of ways.
The fact is, it seems to be true.
As you know, I live out in the country.
I live out in a very suburban area here in the high desert.
And occasionally people will come and try and find me.
I tell people, don't do that.
But they come and they try to find me.
And there was a night, oh I don't know, about two months ago, a month and a half, two months ago.
And there were several people around my fence line, walking around my fence line.
Well, my neighbors who keep a close watch called and said, hey, there's some people out there walking around your fence line.
It was dark.
I had no way to see who it was.
And so we had to end up calling the sheriff, which was kind of sad because it turned out to just be A couple of girls from California who had decided they were going to camp out on Art Bell's, right out in front of Art Bell's home, you know, and listen to the program and have a camp out.
But I had no way of knowing that.
There was no way.
And so the sheriff came up and encouraged them to camp out somewhere else.
The bottom line is, after that night, I said, there has got to be a way.
There's really got to be a way.
And that's how I got introduced to Night Vision.
Night vision.
Do you have any idea what that is?
The military uses it, and now you can.
I did a lot of investigation, and I mean a lot of investigation, and I found an American company There is Russian night vision gear out there, but I don't like Russian gear for a lot of reasons.
One of which is, if it breaks, why, you know, it's Russian equipment, Russian parts.
Good luck.
And so, what I tried to do is find an American company that sold night vision, and by God, I found one.
The company is ATM, and we now have for you, ladies and gentlemen, a night vision scope.
And this thing is incredible.
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Now, if you would like to see a picture of this Night Vision Scope that we're selling, just go to my website www.artbell.com.
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So you can get a look at it if you want to.
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I go out now at night, and I take my night vision scope out.
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We'll talk more about that later, but it's really, really, really cool.
Gene Myers.
Gene, that was a long break because I was introducing a brand new product there, and I appreciate your patience.
Sounds like a great product.
Oh, it is.
God, night vision is so, so cool.
I always wonder, I see it on television, you know, when they show, when the newscasters use it.
Yes.
I think, geez, how long is it going to be before I can buy one of those things?
Well, yeah, you got it.
Here it is.
I've had to keep my mouth shut because, you know, before we sell something, we take a look at everything that's on the market, and there's a big difference between company A, B, C, D, E, and F, and we wanted to find the best, so it took a long time.
Anyway, getting back to tourism in space, what you are proposing is that the external tank, that big orange sucker that carries the shuttle into orbit, not Uh, in fact, uh, be sent back to Earth to burn up and crash into the waters between Hawaii and the U.S.
But instead, be kept in space, and, uh, it's a, it's big, it's about size, uh, space-wise, of a 747, and you are proposing somewhere, uh, about 12, I guess, be in effect welded together, not really, but joined together.
Uh, and then you would have this giant circle with spokes, kind of like the 2001 movie, uh, portrayed, that would spin, providing on the outside of the ring, um, about half gravity or so, or depending on how fast you were spinning.
Um, and then, of course, in the middle, there would be zero G. And, and you're proposing That we do all... What do you suppose, Gene, that it would actually cost to construct that aspect of it?
To construct the tourist location itself?
Well, now, just for comparison here, you've mentioned this International Space Station that NASA's been designing and redesigning and redesigning for the last 15 years.
Right.
That thing is going to end up costing Roughly $100 billion.
We've already spent $40 billion on redesigns since the program started.
It's going to cost about $100 billion to build, launch, and supply over a 10-year lifetime.
The first of these big external tank ring stations, or the International Station, by the way, as you mentioned, will hold about 8 people.
Uh, these, uh, ring stations, these, uh, external tank ring stations, which we call space islands, um, would cost, the first one would cost roughly ten billion dollars.
Okay.
The second one, uh, would be, uh, about six billion, and then from that point on, they'd be about four billion each.
You mean, you're talking now about completed islands?
Right.
You've gotta be kidding, ten billion, and then how much for number two?
Uh, number two would be about, uh, six...
And from that point on, they'd be about four each.
About four each?
Four billion dollars, yes.
And each one of these would carry and hold 300 tourists?
Right, and they wouldn't be jammed in the way they are in a 747.
Remember, a crowded 747 can hold about 500 people.
Oh, I know.
You wouldn't do it that way.
You'd actually, in effect, you'd have about 16 people in the entire interior of a 747.
You know, the whole passenger compartment.
So in other words, making a comparison, it's like, you're saying it would be like having 16 people in a 747, so you'd have a lot of space.
Right, right.
And you divide it up into three decks, you know, just the way the front end of a 747 is.
The one up on top that's kind of a little entertainment lounge, the center one where the passengers are, and then the bottom one where the cargo is now.
So you'd have three decks like that.
You could divide those up into cabins, private cabins.
You could leave large open spaces there for entertainment.
You could actually have theaters.
I think the tanks are 28 feet across and 160 feet long.
So you've got enough room to put cafeterias.
You could even have these dramatic sort of ballrooms that you used to see on the old motion liners.
Oh yeah, sure.
Yeah, with the staircases going up, you know, to the upper decks.
It would actually look strikingly similar to the interior of the station you see in
Deep Space Nine, with the promenade and the upper balconies there looking down on the
lower section.
Sure.
And the movie 2001, which was made in 1968, really was a striking example of what the
interiors of these things could look like as far as hotel suites and the rest of it.
I watched that movie again here a couple of months ago, and I was just stunned at how
similar those proposals from 1968 are to what would happen inside these.
Alright, let me understand.
Now, the external tanks, um, I understand your theory on the external tanks, using them, but there would be a conversion involved of the external tanks.
In other words, you would need, obviously, windows, uh, you would need, I'm just sitting here beginning to think about what you would need.
You would need supplies of oxygen.
You would need the interior converted.
You would need a lot of work done before an external tank would become part of a luxurious space station for tourism.
So, you're telling me That the $10 billion figure, $6 billion for a couple, and then $4 billion after that, would include the conversion money and the work it would take to get that done?
Right.
The tanks are built down in New Orleans right now by Lockheed Martin.
Right.
And I was down there about four years ago, and they gave me a tour of the plant where they build these things, and the program manager took me inside one that was being assembled, and they're stunning to stand inside of to start with, because as you stand Looking down the length of it.
Yes.
The far end of it is a third of a block away.
And the curved ceiling above you is three stories high.
Wow.
Yeah, so they're very dramatic that way.
But she said, as we walked through this thing, she said, you know, we wanted to put hooks on the inside walls here as we build the tanks in New Orleans.
And we could put electrical lines down one whole length of it.
Yes.
And we could put plumbing lines down the other length.
Uh, the entire length of it and then we could put hooks in there that could be used to position the, uh, floors once you got it into, into orbit.
So, once you got it up and the fuel was gone, you would literally be able to plug in all the electrical components that you needed into the, you know, the lines along the walls, and you could hook up, uh, your, uh, water lines to the, uh, plumbing lines that were already built into the walls, because none of those things would affect the, uh, the structure of the tank or the, uh, uh... the uh...
you know the capacity for holding fuel on the way up because it's such a small thing
and then you would carry, as a matter of fact, the Goodyear corporation back in
in uh... seventy nine was proposing a sort of inflatable
uh... set of interiors for this thing. It was a huge deal that would deflate the way an air mattress deflates.
You'd carry it up in the shuttle's cargo bay
and then once you got the tank released in orbit you'd push this thing into a
hatch that's already at one end of the tank and blow it up and it would unfurl
through the whole length of the tank and divide itself up into floors and
ceilings and even furniture.
It was really remarkable how much work has been done on this thing.
How would you attach one tank to the next?
I mean, you sort of use the easy, we'd weld them together concept, but obviously there would be a little more to it than that.
I guess they would have to be, would they have to be cut or would you send them up With some kind of coupling that would allow an easy docking of one to the other?
Or what do you foresee there?
Well, if you picture the tank sitting on the launch pad, you know, with the shuttle and the boosters and all that.
Right.
What they want to do is build an additional section on the bottom of the external tank that would be about 20 feet long.
There's room there between the boosters.
Or something like this.
It would look from the outside like an extension of the tank.
And it would serve about the same purpose as a trunk does on a car.
There would be no fuel in this separate compartment that would be 28 feet wide and 20 feet long.
And in that compartment, you could put a prefabricated connector that would attach to the nose of the following tank.
So that when you got up into orbit, You would release the outside shell, you know, the covering, the housing on this little addition.
Right.
And then, using a device that TRW developed here, kind of a robot forklift in orbit that would be controlled from the shuttle, you would nudge one of the tanks right into this sort of docking port on the end of the one in front of it.
And then they would be bolted in place.
So then, in a way, Could we compare it to, for example, a lot of people have been on trains.
When you move from one car to the next, there's sort of a little intersection that you open one door, there's a little intersection, walk through and go to the next door.
Would it be like that, sort of?
Yes, it would be very much like that, only it would be rigid instead of flexible the way they are in trains.
Right.
So, yeah, and again, these things have all been designed, and that's what struck me about this whole concept when I learned about it 15 years ago.
That so much work has been done on it, and it's just been pushed aside.
It's been left in the file cabinets of the aerospace companies.
What about oxygen?
Air?
How would you get enough up there?
How would it sustain itself?
Would they grow plants?
What do you envision?
One of the more interesting proposals with having a dozen of these things in a ring is
to have two of the tanks be agricultural tanks where you would actually grow all the food
that the station would need.
Really?
Really.
The thing would be set up with hydroponics and I've seen some pretty detailed drawings
of what they look like.
They're quite dramatic.
You could raise fish and actually chickens and that sort of thing in there.
But the plants would be chosen to be of high nutrient value and also to have the best capability
of taking carbon dioxide out of the air and releasing oxygen into it.
Okay.
So they would serve a sort of a dual purpose of cleaning the air for the stations and supplying food to the crews and the tourists.
So you'd be getting gourmet homegrown food.
Exactly, right on board, prepared for you at a moment's notice.
And then, once you got three or four of the stations up there, Then you would have complete stations that would be sort of farm stations.
They would be all agricultural, and they would grow the food and recycle the waste from all the other stations, and then in effect, you know, supply them with all the food.
And then each of the rings could be, from that point forward, each could be devoted to a specific cause.
One would be completely turned over to tourism, and another might be devoted to manufacturing in orbit, and another might be You know, satellite repair or whatever, whatever could be done to make money and to cover the cost of the station in orbit.
How hard would it be to keep these stations on station, in orbit, in a specific orbit?
I mean, these would be gigantic things.
How hard would it be to keep them in place?
You would need, I would think, some sort of occasional boost because orbits slowly decay, correct?
Correct.
The shuttle operates generally from about 175 miles up to 600 miles is its normal range.
Right.
And these stations, if they were put up about 300 to 400 miles, they'd be far enough above the atmosphere that that drag that the shuttle goes under and that the Mir station is going under would be practically eliminated.
Not completely, but practically.
But yes, you would have to have small engines on it That would either boost it back up over a period of time, you know, a couple times a month to make sure that it didn't start drifting down and you'd also want to, you know, be able to have some limited evasive action if a meteor was coming or some other, you know, problem propped up along those lines.
The interesting thing about putting these engines on the stations is since the stations would be self-contained, meaning that they could You know, recycle their own water and oxygen and grow their own food.
Right.
If you had a little extra fuel, you could actually fly the entire station into orbit around the moon within three days.
You're kidding!
No, or you could be flying all the way up to Mars in about three months.
I'm sorry, in about nine months.
My God, Gene!
It's a striking thing, and once you put it in this figure-eight orbit, Between the Earth and the Moon, where it swings around the backside of the Earth for 45 minutes, and then breaks orbit and heads out to the Moon for 3 days?
Yes.
You could transfer the people, the tourists, to the station and off station to our shuttle that was going back, as it swung around the backside of the Earth.
And three days later, as it swung around the backside of the moon, if there were moon bases there, you could drop the people off at the hotels on the moon.
Oh, what an incredible idea!
Absolutely incredible!
No wonder you wanted to get on and spread the word.
Thanks.
No, this is amazing, Gene, and we haven't even started on the fun part yet.
Gene Myers is my guest.
Can you imagine?
Booking a tour, as you would a cruise, into orbit.
Or maybe one that would go to the moon and back.
Practical.
Cheap.
And it sounds like an awful lot of fun.
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It is, and my guest is Gene Myers with the coolest idea in the world, and maybe outside the world.
Imagine, imagine if you will, A gigantic space station built inexpensively, and when I say gigantic, using the external tanks, which already go into space from the space shuttle, each one being roughly the size of a 747 aircraft.
Imagine them tied together in a big circle.
Twelve of them.
The equivalent of twelve 747s.
Then imagine spokes headed toward the center.
Then imagine the whole thing rotating.
Uh, so that, uh, out at the ends, you'd have about half gravity, and toward the middle, you'd have zero G. And that, by the way, is where the suites would be located.
And we're gonna talk about why you would have them there.
There would be, it would be like taking a cruise, only you'd go to space.
Each one of these stations, ladies and gentlemen, It could be built.
The first one for $10 billion, the second for $6 billion, and then each one after that for $4 billion each.
The Space Shuttle commercial version of it, to accomplish all this and take our lucky cruise customers into space, would probably be in the order of just over half a trillion dollars or about I'll make that about 500 million, 600 million dollars, not half trillion.
That would be short of a billion dollars.
Got to get my billions and trillions straight.
So we could carry up to 80 or more people to these islands of luxury and space and fun.
And now Gene tells me that it would be possible to propel them towards the moon so that they would in effect go to the moon, go around the moon, and come back to Earth so you could book a cruise to the moon or even Mars a little further out.
It's such an incredible idea!
He'll tell you more about it in a moment.
Gene, I'm staggered by this.
I'm absolutely staggered by it.
Now, Suppose you were putting together a brochure.
Let's say all this got done and you had your first one in orbit, prepared to accept 300 passengers in space who would be expecting a good time.
I mean, after all, you go to orbit, that in itself obviously is The experience of a lifetime.
I mean, every cruise is described as the experience of a lifetime, but my God, would I love to go to orbit!
And I know a lot of other people feel the same way.
What period of time, typically, would somebody go up for?
I would say that the minimum, for practical purposes, would probably be a couple of weeks.
Two weeks?
Yeah, you wouldn't have these shuttles coming up every couple of hours, at least not early in the program. The more of them you built, as the
traffic increased, you'd have more frequent flights. I would think that the minimum
amount of time would be a couple of weeks up there. It could stretch to a month or two. Besides
that, don't forget that there's the people that would work on the station. When I said 300
people, if it was set up as a tourist station, you might have 200 tourists and then you might
have 100 people that support staff.
Probably Filipinos and Indonesians.
No, no, no.
Most of the cruise lines are using Filipinos and Indonesians.
That's the whole cost down.
And they're very efficient, I might add.
They're very, very nice.
Well, I kind of saw this as being an exclusively American project from beginning to end.
And I, you know, bringing up passengers from other countries would certainly be practical.
I've spoken with a lot of high school kids around the country about this idea, and I've explained to them that these stations would need, you wouldn't have to be a rocket scientist to work up there, they would need gardeners, they would need chefs, they would need electricians and plumbers, and you know, the same sort of... Entertainers.
Entertainers, right.
To hold nine yards, medical personnel.
Now here's a very serious problem.
You said that the cabins would be in the zero-G, or at least some of the cabins would be in the zero-G portion of the station, right?
Right.
Well, you know, when you go on a cruise, Gene, they always put, at night, they put a little piece of chocolate on your pillow.
Now, how would you keep the chocolate on the pillow?
Velcro.
All right.
Actually, though, there has been quite a bit of thought given to what you would do up there.
There's an architectural design firm based in Newport Beach in California and also over in Hawaii that specializes in designing hotels or exotic locations and cruise ship interiors.
They learned about this about a year ago and they've sort of become part of the Space Islands Project.
They've started putting together sample brochures of what exactly the people would do aboard a station like this for entertainment.
All right, and that's what I was getting to.
So what would it come to?
I mean, how would you advertise it?
Well, as you mentioned, just being able to, you know, in effect you could say seeing the Earth the way God sees it.
Alone would be quite a thrill, I would think, for quite a few people.
Oh, yes.
And I suppose you could have special observation decks.
Right.
The central column that I was talking about that sort of goes through the wheel like an axle does, that would be made up of two external tanks sort of butted up against each other, and it would be divided into floors.
And at one of the ends, you could have a very large, clear observation dome.
Where people would, they have contour chairs in this one design that the Hawaiian guys came up with.
It would be like space walking without the bulky suit.
Right, right.
You'd be able to sit up there and because it wouldn't rotate you could look down on the earth and the architect said, you know, we could have a sort of a map appear on the glass as the earth was going beneath you that would list all the names of the rivers and the countries.
And the borders and all that, and you could turn that on and off, so you could look at the United States, you know, as a whole, and you could flip on this map that would appear on the glass, you know, sort of a clear see-through version of it, that would have all the states listed, and you could point out the towns, and that would be especially helpful as you went through the dark side of the Earth, because then you could see the cities, and you'd know exactly what you were looking down on.
Oh, man, I'm just drooling thinking about it.
Well, they've given quite a bit of thought to this, and then these zero-g hotel suites, this is something that always comes up in these conversations, is the romantic possibilities.
I have wanted to talk about sex in space for a long, long time.
As a matter of fact, Gene, I've even had NASA representatives on the air.
And I have asked them, because obviously, I know it's a sensitive subject, but I don't care.
I never have cared about asking about this kind of thing.
Obviously, if you're going to make long journeys, sub-light, to any nearby system with a star and planets, it's going to take a lifetime or two or three or whatever to do this, and you're going to have to have generations in space, which means you're going to have to have reproduction in space, which means you're going to have to have sex in space.
Exactly.
And every time I ask somebody at NASA or wherever else about it, they go, well, we don't really have anything to say about that.
We're very prudish about that.
Yeah.
They've actually sent a married couple up on the shuttle.
There was a flight about four years ago that just happened that two of the astronauts that went up were married and there was a lot of talk among the ground crews.
These two were trying to find, you know, some secluded little corner with the With the acquiescence of the rest of the crew to do some high-level experimentation.
Experimentation, yeah, for a 100-mile-high club, to be the first chartered members of something like that.
But I've never been able to get any information back from the astronauts that I've spoken with or the ground crews.
They also point out that the astronauts, generally on the flights, the astronauts, their time schedule, It's so tight, they're actually controlled from minute to minute to minute as to what experiments they're supposed to do or what they're supposed to fire that it would be hard for them.
So they would have actually had to put it in the official schedule.
Right.
The rest of the crew goes in one direction.
Sex time.
Right.
These bigger external tank stations give you plenty of room to play around with those options.
Oh, so you'd have a cabin, I mean.
Oh, sure.
Right?
Yeah, right.
You'd have a cabin that was, if it was in the central column where the, you know, where there wouldn't be any gravity, you could have windows that could look down on the earth or out at the moon or watching other ships docking with, you know, the station itself, which I would think in itself would be a very dramatic romantic backdrop to it.
Oh, yeah, dramatic.
Gene, what kind of bed would you have?
Well...
Or would there be a bed as such?
There probably wouldn't be.
There would be...
You know, the whole thrill of it, I would think, would be...
without getting too indelicate, having sexual contact with nothing else touching your body.
No, no, I understand, but I mean...
Eventually, you know, after the...
Probably they wouldn't let you smoke up there.
Boy, there's a downside.
Anyway, um, uh, but I was going to say after the cigarette, why then you're going to go to sleep.
And when you go to sleep, you don't want to be sort of floating around bumping into things.
So you wouldn't have a traditional bed as we know them, but... No, the astronauts on the shuttle sleep in sleeping bags that are attached to the wall.
And something like that, you know, a variation of that may be what would end up being used here.
I see.
The big advantage of these ring stations is that people could go back to their suite.
They would have two suites, one in the central column and one out in the ring.
And they could go to the ring for meals and for showers and for, you know, general sort of life support activities.
And then go to the suites in the center for the more exotic... Pleasurable activities.
Pleasurable activities, right.
One of the other things that a lot of the seniors find, not seniors, but I guess guys my age, I hate to say, when they're 50s and up, find fascinating is that when you're in zero-g, all of the astronauts have commented on this, the blood that gravity normally pulls down to your legs floats up to your upper body.
So your chest fills out.
The astronauts' chests expand by two to three inches, which I would think would be fascinating to women in their 40s and beyond.
You mean they suddenly bloom?
Yes, you could say that.
They're facing, and the blood also moves up to your face, so because the faces look fuller, I've seen shots of astronauts in their 40s Taking an hour before they were launched and an hour after they got to orbit.
And they look like father and son shots because the extra blood flowing into your face sort of fills in a lot of the lines.
You know, it's like a balloon that's partially deflated and then you blow it up a little bit more.
So a lot of the age lines disappear.
Shannon Lucid, who was 53, was up there for six months on the Mir station.
Right.
A lot of the commentators commented, the news commentators commented on how different she looked in orbit.
Uh, then she did before launch and when she returned, and that was the reason.
She said that, uh, she told some of her fellow astronauts when she got back that some of the physical changes that she went under because of this redistribution of blood made her look like she was 20 years younger than she was when she went up.
So it's a temporary condition.
It only happens when you're in zero G and, you know, when you come back to Earth you're back in gravity's grasp.
For, you know, as far as being one of the options of a vacation in orbit like that, this is something that, you know, might not be of interest to 20-year-olds, but for the rest of us in the real world here, it's just one more, it's like frosting on the cake.
Really, I'm literally drooling.
I mean, I've always wanted to go to space anyway, and I would take the opportunity just like that, or pay dearly to go.
Oh, that brings up another topic.
It's going to be expensive.
I mean, certainly at first, for the individual or, say, a couple, to book a couple of weeks or a month is going to be an expensive proposition.
How expensive, would you guess?
Well, there's kind of two components involved here in the cost.
One is the transportation of getting up to the station, and you'd have to factor in the shuttle launch costs, which are about $100 million per launch.
And then the cost of the shuttle itself.
And the second one is staying aboard the station.
But one of the peculiar things that I've found in finance, every time the shuttle went up, if it released its external tank and sold it to, in effect, a real estate consortium in orbit that would use the tank to build another station.
In other words, as you continued to take people up, each time you would add a component to a new station.
Yes, and by selling the tank, In effect, to this consortium that was building the stations, you'd recover all of your launch costs and your construction costs of the shuttle.
So you could say that flying up and back would be free.
There wouldn't be any reason to charge the passengers at all for that.
But then, the money would come from charging a daily rate for staying aboard the station.
And that would be pretty much based on the cubic foot area of the cabin itself.
a 10 by 20 foot cabin that was about 7 1⁄2 to 8 feet tall high.
Right.
If you were going to pay for the whole station through tourist income,
it would be something on the order of $3,000, $2,000 to $3,000 per day.
That's not much.
No, that's not much.
But beyond that, in the first station, of course, as I mentioned, would be the most expensive.
So you're talking about a 200 square foot cabin.
Roughly, right?
Roughly right, right.
And that is not very different than you would find on a cruise ship.
Right.
Now of course if you wanted a bigger cabin, you know a double or if you were the, you
know I'd imagine there's going to be a lot of Bill Gates and you know the Sultan of Brunei
and these type of people going up first and that's good.
Those people might be willing to pay, what do you think, a half a million dollars each
to be one of the first thousand people that goes aboard a station like that?
You could depend on it.
Which would be fine for the rest of us because the more they paid during that first year
of operation, the cheaper it would be for the rest of us that went up after that, you
know that first flush was over with.
No question about it.
The other thing is that we think that the first of these big stations, because this would be so visually dramatic and it would be something that could be watched around the world, we think, with the same intensity that the Apollo launches were, we think that corporations may be interested in sponsoring the construction of that first big station.
A company like Coca-Cola, for instance, stepping forward and saying, we would like to sponsor one of these external tanks that's used in the station, and we'd be willing to pay $500 million for that tank to get our name on it as it was prepared for launch, and it was launched, and as it was built into the section.
Once the whole ring was completed, then you'd take off the logos.
You wouldn't want to, you know, have the thing appear to be like a...
Race track with all the logos splashed all over it.
My God, this is an exciting idea.
That's going to drop the cost for the customers, you know, the actual clients.
Right.
Could drop it down to a few hundred dollars per day.
Oh, a few hundred.
Hey, listen, you can barely stay in Paris in a decent hotel for a few hundred dollars a day.
Oh, my.
All right.
Hold on, Gene.
Gene Myers is my guest.
And he and well, you can hear what he's talking about.
What do you think, folks, so far?
Sound like fun?
Or is that a drastic understatement?
Is it something that could become reality?
You bet!
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Now, here again is Art Bell.
Once again, here I am.
Can you imagine, folks?
I mean, sit back and think about it for a moment.
How about 30 days in space, on a luxurious space station, where you'd have Pleasures in the night and the day, which by the way would occur every roughly 90 minutes.
You'd hit the terminator.
So you'd have nighttime every 90 minutes.
So you'd have nighttime every 90 minutes.
Oh my.
Oh my.
Carnal delight.
Every 90 minutes.
But how many people would die in space?
Anyway, we'll get back to Mr. Gene Myers and his incredible idea in a moment.
Alright, back now to Gene Myers.
Gene, here we are again.
Now, who have you Well, initially, when I first learned about this thing, I went to the aerospace companies.
Martin Marietta, which was the company that built the tanks back then, Rockwell, who built the shuttles.
Right.
And I said, why aren't you guys doing something with this?
What's the story?
You've done all the development work.
Their reaction was, well, if NASA comes to us, or if the federal government comes to us and says, here's a pile of money, we want you to go ahead and develop this idea, we'll do it.
But those companies that were involved in the shuttle program never really sold anything outside of the government.
Rockwell had no contact with tourism, and neither did Martin Marietta, and now that Martin and Lockheed have merged, it's the same story.
Everything they sell is to the government.
But now that Boeing has bought Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas, Boeing has a much keener sense of what's going on in the tourism industry.
They build aircraft that fly people almost 10,000 miles in a single leap, so carrying people 300 or 400 miles up to orbit does not seem to them to be an impossible thing.
So they've been more attentive or more interested in this project at this point, but because they just went through this merger with McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell, they're still trying to handle the indigestion problems that the corporations are having there.
So, it's been my belief all along that this idea is so dramatic and would have so many, you know, generate so much excitement in the general, in the American public, that non-aerospace corporations would probably be the ones that would take the lead in bringing the concept into public view.
Private sector.
Private sector, right.
And, you know, when I mentioned that NASA paid two and a half billion dollars for the shuttles, And these people at Rockwell and now Boeing think they could build a much more... A second generation.
A much improved version for $500 million.
Part of it is that private buyers would not have to jump through all the hoops that government purchasing requires.
You've heard these stories of $7,000 coffee pots and $500 screwdrivers.
So a private company coming in, somebody like an airlines, You know, we'd really cut out the fat and say, look, this is what we need.
We don't have to go through these 14 layers of signatures on these.
Three layers is enough.
And, of course, the FAA would come in and oversee the construction to make sure that, you know, nothing got out of whack there.
Plus, really, the shuttle and Mir have done a lot of the work necessary to tell us what we would have to do commercially, haven't they?
That is exactly right.
The shuttles have flown almost 90 flights so far.
Which means they've taken 90 of these tanks up and destroyed them so far.
But, we've learned a great deal about which components in the shuttle are necessary and which are not, and the ones that do break down, instead of burying them down in the center of the craft, you know, where you have to disassemble the whole thing to get to it.
If they can't come up with an improved version of that component, they could at least put it near one of the walls or one of the access hatches, so changing it out after each flight would be much simpler.
They have new engines that NASA helped them, NASA paid for the redesign of.
The older, original shuttle engines had to be pulled out and changed after every flight.
These newer ones that NASA started using partially about a year ago can go for 10 flights before they have to be pulled out and changed.
So the maintenance costs of the shuttles are dropping and dropping.
Last year, NASA turned over, gave a $7 billion contract to a private company down in Houston called the United Space Alliance to do all of the maintenance on the shuttles from the time they touch down until they're ready to launch.
This is a private company.
It's half owned by Boeing.
NASA thinks that these private companies can do a better job of lowering the maintenance costs and preparing the shuttles quickly for flight than the government people can.
And Dan Golden, the head of NASA, about a month ago asked This United Space Alliance to submit a report to him on what they would do with the shuttles to open commercial markets in space if NASA signed over the whole shuttle fleet to the United Space Alliance, which they want to do within the next year.
Really?
And these ideas of using the external tanks, in effect selling the external tanks to private developers in orbit, and even putting advertising on the side of the shuttle or the side of the tanks, We're all in that report that they gave to Golden, and Golden is very excited about it.
He would like to get out of the space shuttle business, because NASA was really designed to, you know, develop things that have never been developed before, not to handle these milk-run shuttle flights up and down and up and down.
Okay, this would be a big item in space.
How well would we be able to see it, just as a matter of curiosity, from Earth as it came overhead?
How well would we be able to see it?
What would it look like compared to, say, a satellite, which is tiny, even the mirror, which is tiny by comparison?
Well, it would be brighter than the brightest star in the sky.
In fact, since the ring would be, it's actually a third of a mile around, you know, the circumference, the ring would be, would probably be visible from the surface as a ring with, you know, open sky in the center of it without Without binoculars.
And then with binoculars, of course, you could see it pretty dramatically.
Wow.
Right now, you notice the tanks are orange.
That orange coloration is a kind of a foam insulation that's sprayed on the outside of the tank to help keep the liquid fuels cold during the launch cycle.
Before they put that insulation on, of course, the tanks, which are made of aluminum, are shiny.
So one of the Things that NASA, that might have to be done in orbit, probably would have to be done in orbit, would be to peel off that insulation.
Which means that you'd have... A very bright, shiny aluminum.
Exactly.
A very bright, shiny aluminum up there.
And because there's no atmosphere, it wouldn't corrode.
Right, of course not.
So it'd be a pretty spectacular sight.
If you remember, the first couple of launches, the first two shuttle launches, had white tanks.
They simply painted the foam insulation with white paint.
And that's one of the reasons that a company like Coca-Cola is so interested in this.
Because you could paint the tank white, and then have the red Coke logo on the whole length of the tank.
Now, $500 million sounds like a lot of money for a company like Coke to shell out, but they spend $8 billion a year on advertising worldwide.
$8 billion!
All right, now in case people think that you pie-in-the-sky'd this, you have actually already gone to some cruise companies, haven't you?
Carnival Princess, Royal Caribbean, and they're showing some interest.
They want to know what the public thinks of the idea.
That's exactly right.
NASA itself pointed out about a year ago that if very large space stations were ever built, They would probably be designed and built and managed by cruise ship companies more likely than hotel companies and certainly not aerospace companies.
Because these things have to have all of their own medical staff and everything on board the station just the way a cruise ship does.
Of course.
And Carnival in particular, since they're the largest one, they were quite intrigued by it.
They wanted to know the costs.
I don't think they're interested in buying a station.
I think they're interested in a management contract to operate the station once it's built.
Makes sense.
And a contract like that might be, you know, $50 to $100 million a year, which would be a big chunk of money for them.
At the other end, at the early end, we proposed to Carnival that the guy that owns Carnival
is a fellow named Mickey Arison.
He also owns most of Pan American Airways, which was reactivated about a year ago down
in Miami.
You remember the scene from the movie 2001 where the Pan Am space plane is flying up
towards this big ring-shaped space station?
Oh, I do.
Well, we thought we could reshoot that with an external tank ring station with Carnival's
name on it and have a Pan Am space shuttle flying up and docking with this thing.
In that segment, we think, would be run very broadly on newscasts around the world.
We think it would get the same kind of exposure that the old FBI shots got, you know, when that first idea was first pitched out by Reagan, the Star Wars defense.
Oh, look, the coverage would be astounding.
Yeah, so we've gone to them and we say, You may or you may not make money off the stations over the long run.
You know, five or six years from now when the first ring is in operation.
But you could have a bonanza of PR right here at the beginning of the cycle by becoming one of the early official sponsors at a much lower level.
Maybe, you know, somewhere in the, say, five to ten million dollar range, which would be enough to get the video done.
It would be enough to get study contracts out.
To not just the aerospace companies, but to the six big shipyards in the United States that are really starving for work now because of the defense cutback.
Oh yeah, that's another thing.
What would this do in the private sector for jobs?
Oh, it'd be enormous.
We lost about 500,000 jobs, aerospace jobs, in California since 1989 when the defense cutback started.
This single-handedly could bring back a quarter to a half of those in California.
But then, it turns out that the shipyards, the six big shipyards around the country, which have the expertise to design these things much more than the aerospace companies have, because if you look at the station, it has a lot more in common with a submarine.
And it does with an airliner.
Sure.
So the shipyards could actually build the external tanks.
There's nothing magical about it.
It's a pretty straightforward construction thing.
And they could add these little aft cargo carriers that I was talking about.
Yes.
Sort of a trunk that goes in the end.
Right.
They could build those whole structures actually for quite a bit less than Martin Marietta is charging.
They're selling their tanks now for about $40 million each.
The shipyards could build them for half that price with all the electronics, you know, and all that built into it.
And then, of course, they would be in a very good position to design the life support system for the whole station because they have to worry about, you know, plumbing and electrical things on the cruise ships and the, you know, the submarines and that.
Gene, you're on the air right now everywhere where NASA is.
Yes.
What kind of reaction do you think that you would get, or maybe you already know because I'm sure you have talked to some people at NASA about this.
What kind of reaction do you get when you lay all this out for them?
Their official reaction is pretty much that they don't want to talk about it.
They mumble about two technical issues that came up about 20 years ago.
One was, how do you get the insulation off the outside of the tank?
Which, you know, is a pretty simple project.
They've even, down at Martin Marietta, they've developed a kind of a knife that slices this stuff off in orbit.
And the second thing is, and the reason for that is they didn't want this stuff to slowly shed as the station was in orbit.
You'd end up with a kind of an orange ring of dust that the station would have to keep flying through.
Right.
The second thing that they said would stop it, technically, was how do you get the extra fuel Out of the tank when the shuttle releases it, because there's a little bit of residual sort of emergency supply left.
Sure.
Which just floored me that, you know, a group as big as NASA would consider something like that to be any kind of a challenge at all.
So, the other thing though is that NASA has gotten all of their political support behind this International Space Station.
Clinton and Gore have made a huge deal about it, and congressmen that are supporting The International Station have already, you know, sort of put their reputations on the line by putting all this money into it over the years.
So NASA and the congressmen that have supported the International Station are a little afraid that if they backed off and they said and passed perhaps a regulation saying that private industry should develop this, you know, without using any taxpayer money and maybe cancel the International Station or try to bring some of those components into this Much larger stations.
The congressmen and NASA are afraid that the public would say that they've been backing the wrong course all of these years and they've wasted a huge amount of money.
Well, maybe they have.
I mean, why build the $80 billion, soon to be $100 billion or more, space station, international, when you could, for example, do the whole thing in the private sector and then give the government As much space on one of these things as they would need, which would be an additional source of income.
Sure.
Another thing, another use for the stations, besides tourism, is doing a final assembly and checkout of satellites in orbit.
And remember the Mars probe that they sent off about four years ago?
Of course.
Well, if they would have been able to launch that thing into orbit, or even do the final assembly aboard one of these stations, and then simply push it outside the station, And tested in real space conditions to make sure all their subsystems are working.
Yes.
Before they sent it off, it could have saved them a fortune.
Or, recovery and repair.
Or, take a hundred, you know, scientists from JPL and put them on board one of these stations and fire the whole thing out to Mars.
with a complete laboratory in orbit and let them have their landers go down, retrieve
stuff and bring it up to the station, rather than the kind of piddling way that they're
going at it now.
What they're doing is an incredible feat, these newer missions that they're launching.
But guys like Hoagland, how much do you think he'd be willing to pay to get on that first
flight to Mars?
Or even the one going around the moon?
Hoagland would stow away at the adventure.
Because when a station like that swings over the moon, because there's no atmosphere, it could actually come down to maybe five or six miles off the surface.
So you get some dramatic shots of these things.
You've been on the Alaska cruises and you know what they're like going through the glaciers.
Oh yes.
That's a stunning sight.
Yes it is.
This thing zipping along the craters and the mountains of the moon and looking down in the caverns and the craters themselves would be a thrill that nobody in history has As far as we know, some of your audience may think that it's been done before.
David Adair, who is a rocket scientist, who I've had on the program, is very, very popular, well known.
Recommended you to me, and now I see why.
Thank you.
Now I see why.
This is the most incredible concept and idea that I've ever heard.
Well, I'll tell you that there's one other thing here, there's actually several other things, The one point I'd really like to make is these cruise ship companies have told me that they're very interested in this project, but they don't want to be seen as too far out if they came out and supported it.
They are sort of asking me to be a stalking horse.
Go around and, you know, I've written a few newspaper stories on this, op-ed pieces, and some of the magazine pieces have popped up.
They're waiting for feedback from the general public about this.
So one of the things that I'd like to ask your audience Rather than calling their congressmen and, you know, rattling nose cages, which I don't think are going to amount to anything, if they simply call the travel agents tomorrow morning and did it again maybe a couple of times next week, their own travel agents, if they have one, or just flip through the Yellow Pages and find some local ones right there in town, call them and say they heard a fellow from the Space Islands Project on the Ark Bell Show last night talking about the interest that these cruise ship lines
cruise lines are showing in commercial space stations and asking if the travel agents knew
anything about it. Why not go right to the cruise lines?
Well that uh my belief was that the travel agents would then call the cruise lines. They know the
people to get to. They know you know The travel agents know the director of marketing and PR.
Fine, but the average travel agent is going to go, oh, come on, and they're not going to waste a call on this.
I'm not sure.
They would have to understand the whole concept before they would get excited enough.
On the other hand, believe me, if people were to go straight to the cruise lines, I'm not trying to tell you how to do what you're doing, but Carnival Princess, Royal Caribbean, whatever.
If people were to actually call the cruise lines, if they were inundated with calls of interest... You know, as it turns out, I happen to have Carnival's phone number.
Hold on to it, because you're not going anywhere.
We have only but begun.
What I want to do is, at midnight, I want to kind of recap, because we've got Los Angeles coming online.
I want to recap What we've done quickly, and then I want to go to the phones, and I want you to listen to what the people say about your idea.
Okay.
One minor point.
I'm an industrial engineer, but I didn't come up with these designs.
There have been a ton of people inside NASA in the aerospace company, literally hundreds of engineers, that have worked out how this could be done.
My contribution here is bringing it into public view outside of the aerospace inner circles, and bringing it to the marketing departments of some of
these corporations and eventually to the news media.
So I didn't want anybody to think that I was responsible for designing the stations.
I've looked over all the technical stuff, and I'm stunned at how much of it has been done, and the level of expertise that has already been poured into this idea.
All right.
Stay right where you are, and we'll be right back to you after the top of the hour.
My guest is Gene Myers, and we will begin taking phone calls after the top of the hour.
Tourism in space.
300 tourists to a station in space.
How would you like to go?
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Now again, here is Art Bell.
My guest is Gene Myers with the IDC.
My guest is Gene Myers with the idea of the millennium.
One that he does not necessarily claim for himself, but one that he has done a lot of work on.
And he's ready to present it to you, and that's what we've been doing over the last couple of hours.
He represents Space Islands Projects.
Space Islands Projects, in a nutshell, Would take the external tank, you know that big orange tank that's presently used to boost the shuttle to orbit.
The tank that actually goes to orbit.
A great big tank.
This tank is the size of a 747.
And instead of dipping back and forcing the tank to re-enter the atmosphere, burn up and crash into the ocean between Hawaii and the U.S.
uselessly, Gene's idea is to take the tank on up into orbit and now close your eyes and imagine this link 12 of these tanks each the size of a 747 aircraft together in roughly a circle with then spokes extending toward the center and having about
300 tourists at a time.
300, I said.
Go up and live on this station.
To take a tour.
To take a cruise.
Not to the Caribbean.
Not to Europe.
Not to the Med.
But to space.
And it doesn't even stop there.
Imagine this.
You would have a room.
About 200 square feet, we imagine.
At the center of this where there would be zero G the entire thing just like in 2001 would be rotating There would be gravity at about half gravity or depending on of course the speed of the rotation toward the end of the station The circle and then towards the center you would have zero G and that's where the cabins would be located Where you and your Loved one could experience delights beyond description.
There would be the delights on a cruise ship.
There would be entertainment.
There would be shows, Broadway-type shows.
There would be theaters.
There would be Open locations where you had glass all around so you literally would be in space looking down on the earth.
Now, I'll have him run over this in a sketch form for you in a moment once again.
And then we're going to take calls from all of you and see what you think of the idea.
The economics are definitely there, and we'll roll over that again in a second.
Okay, Gene Meyer is coming back now, and this last summer, he formed the Space Islands Project, which is a loosely knit group of engineers, writers, educators, and architects who are aggressively bringing the space tourism and space manufacturing potential of the concept you're about to hear about to the attention of American corporations.
And we're going to do a sort of a 101 recap here, if we can, Gene.
Tell people, if you can, take about 5 or 10 minutes and give us the 101 again from the beginning on what your idea is.
Okay, well this is an idea that was originally developed almost 25 years ago when the space shuttles were being designed The engineers looked at that orange external tank, that big orange cylinder pressed against the shuttle's belly when it sits on the launch pad, and once they realized that that tank would stay attached to the shuttle all the way up to orbit, and then it would be released in space, and then forced back into the atmosphere, they suggested that the tanks could be left up there when they're empty, and that a dozen of these tanks could be joined into a ring that would
Whoops.
Oh, that's just a little noise from all the rain.
Yeah.
Laminates.
Damn El Nino noise.
A dozen of these tanks, which are about the size of a 747, could be joined together.
Joined together.
Almost welded into a circle.
Oh, dear.
It's breaking up pretty badly here.
Yes, it is.
Joined into a circle that would resemble the space station that you saw in the movie 2001, or the one that is seen in the current Deep Space Nine television show.
So, they, over the next 10 years, from about 75 to 85, did a great deal of design work on this.
A lot of these engineers did it on their own time, off the clock, and to figure out exactly what sort of connections you could put together, how you could divide these this ring up into three internal decks that would end up
looking pretty much like the interior of a cruise ship. And they went through the numbers. Once they
started launching the shuttles, they got some pretty good cost estimates on what it takes
to launch a shuttle into orbit, and we know how much the tanks cost to build, and we know
what even commercial space shuttles could These would be second generation shuttles that had a passenger compartment in the cargo bay.
And so you would be able to fit about 80 people or more into each space shuttle cargo compartment, which would be converted with seats kind of like an airliner, I guess.
It'd actually be a cargo Now this would be a second generation shuttle.
that central section of the fuselage, the people would actually get, climb into this
passenger compartment when it was detached from the shuttle, and then this thing would
be dropped into the cargo bay of the shuttle and then the shuttle would be launched.
So that way the shuttle, that particular shuttle could be used for either carrying cargo up
in that section or you could put one of these passengers in there.
Now this would be a second generation shuttle.
Presently shuttles cost how much?
They cost about $2 billion to buy and they cost roughly $300 to $400 million to launch.
And you're saying that a second generation civilian model of this, built by Rockwell and Company, would cost how much?
The cost engineers that worked on the original shuttle tell me that the second generation ones could be built for $500 million to $600 million.
Oh my!
Which is about three times the price of a 747, but considering what these shuttles have to go through on re-entry and the extensive engines that they require, I don't think that's too far out of line.
I think the $2 billion is for NASA shuttles, but they were bought with government procedures rather than corporate purchasing things, and they were intentionally over-designed because nobody had ever built anything like that before.
There was a certain logic to it.
Well, they've done all the developmental work now, so obviously it would get cheaper.
Right.
You asked me earlier what NASA thought about this, and to me, if private industry picked this idea up and really ran with it, it would be a huge tribute, a huge justification of NASA's shuttle work over the last 25 years.
No question about it.
All right.
How much to launch?
The newer shuttles would cost about $100,000,000 to launch.
Okay.
And about $500,000,000, $500,000,000 or $600,000,000 to buy.
Okay, so instead of jettisoning and causing to re-enter this tank, you would then sell the tank?
Right, you would leave the tank in orbit and the tank would be modified so that it would have its own guidance engines on it.
And you would also have some sort of things that in effect are remote-controlled rocket-powered forklifts in orbit that TRW and a couple of the other companies have designed that would capture these tanks and move them into a safe position until they were ready for assembly.
They would act as a sort of an engine that would, you know, guide the tank around.
And you would sell these tanks for that purpose for about the amount of money it cost to launch?
Right.
You could sell them for, say, $300 million each.
Wow.
If it cost $100 million to launch, then You could apply maybe a hundred million more towards the purchase price of the shuttle, and a hundred million would be profit.
So the shuttles would be making a profit every time you launched them, without having to charge anything for the cargo.
Whether it was freight going up to the station, or coming back, or passengers going up and back.
It would be both at separate times.
Right, so you'd in effect be leaving half of the shuttle system, the external tank in orbit, And actually, if they change those solid rocket boosters that they have on the sides?
Yes.
One of the designs was going to replace those with liquid boosters that had the same kind of engine on the bottom that the shuttle has, and then after two minutes, just those little engines on the bottom of these two boosters would fall off, and the booster shells, which would in effect be slender external tanks, would be carried to orbit, and that would be the spokes for the wheel.
So, you know, you're ending up converting most, something like 65% of all the shuttle launch vehicle into a long-term revenue generator in orbit instead of trying to get everything back from this, you know, eight and a half minutes or so.
So you would have astounding space when you were done.
You would have, if you were to count all the circle plus the spokes of this Luxury Cruise Space Station.
How much square footage would you end up with?
Well, the basic design here that we look at is a dozen in the ring, two more through the center, acting like a sort of an actual wheel.
That would be the zero-g section.
And then we also wanted to have six more tanks that were floating free around the edges of the
station so that people could go out there and be in complete isolation.
These would be maybe a quarter of a mile away from the tank proper and you would have these
little almost van-like shuttles that would carry people out there for a day or two and
then come back.
So that whole complex of, and of course these free floating ones would have their own very
small engines on them to make sure they didn't drift too far away.
That whole complex of 20 ETs would have about a million and a half cubic feet of interior
space.
Oh my gosh.
You'd need about a half a million of that for life support and the cruise quarters and
that sort of thing.
Two of those tanks by the way would be set aside, two of the tanks in the ring would
be set aside to grow food for the station and those same plants would recycle most of
the oxygen and the water that the station produced.
So because of that, because the stations would be almost completely independent of ground
supplies you could actually fly the entire station into orbit around the moon and back.
The trip would take about three days out and three days back.
So a one week excursion would give you some time in earth orbit, some time between the
Watching the Earth grow smaller and the Moon grow larger.
Right.
The same sort of thing.
And then, because there's no atmosphere on the Moon, when you did get into orbit around the Moon, you could drop down to just a few miles above the surface and really skim the mountaintops and look down in the craters.
It'd just be a stunning visual experience.
Plus, the partial gravity in the ring throughout the whole trip and the zero-g in the center would add even more to it.
And you know, you talked about some of the entertainment that would go on onboard the station itself.
There would be some of that, but we think that the passengers would be so struck by the visual sights that they would see, having the Earth go beneath them in daylight and nighttime.
You described a special Location where you would be literally surrounded by glass.
Right.
One of the two tanks that are in the center, the top part would be, once the tank was assembled, that could be, the tip of it could be replaced with a kind of a combination of glass and plastic that would be clear, so that you'd have this huge area, a room that would be about 28 feet in diameter and might be 30 or 40 feet high, that would be glass on all sides.
And the design firm over in Hawaii called Wimberley, Ellison, Tong and Gu that has done some of these interior layouts wanted to have a series of seats that would be mounted on, these would be sort of contour seats that would be mounted on poles that sort of floated, not floated but were attached to the top and the bottom of this thing so that people could sit in the seats and look out the glass and as they looked at the earth beneath them, A map could be projected on a glass that would give them the names of the cities and the rivers and the continents and all of that beneath them.
So it would be kind of like reaching out and touching the face of God?
You know, in a sense it really would.
It really would.
And then of course there would be the magnification on board the station would also be available so people could Actually using kind of spy satellite technology could look down into cities and see things like this the cars beneath you know going down the streets and they could get that much detail if they wanted to or the forests in Brazil or the ice packs at the North Pole you know the whole they'd literally have the whole world at their feet
And they wouldn't have the strict regimen at all of our astronauts who have every moment occupied doing experiments for this or that or whatever their entire lives are planned up there.
You would have time to do anything you wanted.
Go out and observe, as you just suggested.
Your cabin would have about 200 square feet.
It would be in a zero-g environment.
The romantic possibilities would be endless and frequent.
Now, you would go from daylight to nighttime, as I joked about earlier.
What, about every 90 minutes, something like that?
About every 45 minutes.
It takes 90 minutes to make a whole orbit, so half of that time would be spent in the daylight, and half would be spent in the darkness.
That's if you launched out of Canaveral, and that's where the shuttles go now, into these orbits around the equator.
NASA, actually, NASA and the Air Force built a shuttle launch complex in Vandenberg in California that was supposed to launch the shuttles into polar orbit.
Right.
And they were actually, I think, six months away from the first shuttle launch from Vandenberg when the Challenger blew up.
Well, I know they launch weather satellites into polar orbit.
Right.
They launch a lot of weather satellites, spy satellites, and all of these cell phone satellites, you know, the Iridium and And Teledesic, the one that Bill Gates is behind.
Oh, yes.
These are constellations of several hundred satellites that are going to be launched from Vandenberg into these polar orbits.
People actually have no idea what's coming with Iridium.
We could do a whole show on that.
Oh, yeah.
And the thing is that one of the other uses for these stations, if it was launched into polar orbit, would be to use it rather than just having one for the tourists.
You could have one for tourists up there, but you could have another one.
That did nothing but repair these iridium-type satellites that are going up in orbit, because they'd be at the same location.
They'd be in polar orbit, about four or five hundred miles up, exactly where the satellites are.
So instead of replacing them constantly, when something would go wrong, you would simply pull them in, you'd have a station, you'd have technicians and scientists, and they'd repair them and kick them out the door.
Exactly right.
Those things, the satellites, cost five to ten million each.
So the station, for a million bucks, could repair one in a matter of hours or days, send one of these little robot probes out to grab it, drag it back into the station, bring it inside, replace the solar panels or refuel it, which is a big problem.
There's thousands of satellites in space now that are perfectly useful.
But they've just run out of fuel.
There's no way to add more fuel to their little engine.
All right.
Well, now, back to the tourist side of things for a moment.
I just went on a cruise to the Med.
We had one night when we got into 30-foot waves.
Now, even a big cruise ship, big Holland America, beautiful cruise ship, in 30-foot waves, it begins to rock and roll a little bit.
And all of a sudden, people were not in the theater, they were not in the showroom, they were not on any of the main decks with the entertainment.
Everybody was getting sick.
And so you could walk through the ship and it was literally empty because they were all in their room, turning purple.
Now, the reason I bring that up is because in space, in Zero-G, Not that I've ever been there, but I'm told that you have the feeling that you are falling.
Right.
And so there would be the possibility of space sickness.
And I would imagine space sickness, like sea sickness, once it begins, you would have a very, very hard time stopping it.
So that's what I want to address when we come back.
And then I'm going to open the lines.
There'd have to be space barf bags.
But wait a minute, you could go out to the end where there'd be gravity, couldn't you?
When it's all right and it's coming home, we gotta get right back where we started from.
Nothing's good, nothing's wrong, we gotta get right back where we started from.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
My guest is Gene Myers and he will be right back.
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Ah, to plagiarize a line from the movie Contact.
Wanna take a ride?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh boy.
Gene Myers is my guest, and his idea so far, as I see it, is flawless.
300 tourists going to a luxurious space station that would orbit Earth or take you on a trip around the moon and back.
What do you think?
Believe it or not, he has already approached several cruise lines, including Carnival, Princess, and Royal Caribbean, and they want to know what you think.
So he's gone a little further with this than you might imagine.
Anyway, we're about to open the line, so if you have questions, and I've got a million faxes already for Gene.
Uh, come now.
I do have one great big announcement for you.
Beginning Monday night, Tuesday morning, we've got a new affiliate.
It's been a long time coming, folks.
But beginning Monday night, Tuesday morning, we are joined By W.A.B.C.
in New York City.
I've been waiting a lifetime for this and it's kind of a completion for me in a lot of ways as the show has grown and grown and grown.
We're in just about every major market in the U.S.
and we have done what no network has ever done before.
We have begun in the West and moved our way slowly but surely toward the East, proving
ourselves every step of the way.
Beginning, of course, as I said, in the West, proving our ratings power in San Diego, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and so forth and so on.
Then we moved toward the Middle West, where we have a line of great affiliates, including WLS and Chicago, of course.
And I just really can't name them all.
We're coming up on 400 affiliates.
But we slowly began moving east.
And the final big door that we had to crack open was WABC New York.
And They just opened the door.
So beginning Monday night, Tuesday morning, the Big Apple.
And the big one there.
77 WABC.
Anybody remember that?
I grew up listening to WABC in New York.
And so we'll have to find out.
We'll see how New Yorkers accept what we do, which is, to put it mildly, a little bit different.
Tonight is a good example of it.
Gene Myers is my guest.
We're about to take phone calls.
Gene, welcome back to the show.
Thanks very much.
Congratulations on WABC.
Oh, thank you.
It's kind of one of those lifelong dreams come true.
All right, here's a fax and then we'll go to the phones.
Miss Bell, your show tonight is fascinating.
Would you please ask Gene Myers If he's contacted the Learning Channel or maybe Discovery Channel, they may be interested in producing a program based on this idea related to space tours and the reuse of the shuttle's external fuel tank.
How about publishing articles in newspapers, magazines, which are widely read?
He needs press.
Why doesn't he have a website?
Oh, geez.
That's from Jeff in El Paso, Texas, and those are all good questions.
Yes.
I've gone to the... It's a peculiar thing.
If you're going to go to Discovery Channel and those types of folks, they want to know what publicity has been generated up to that point.
They don't seem to... You know how it is.
Everybody wants to be the second one on a bandwagon.
Everybody wants to be the first.
So I've had... I love to be the first.
I have no problem with that.
That's true.
That's true.
You're a real exception.
I've had about three dozen articles published in papers around the country, Miami and Orlando and Sacramento and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., about the concept.
A couple of the news magazines have picked it up, not the big ones, but Insight on the News, kind of a Republican slanted version of Newsweek, did a very extensive article a couple of months ago on it.
So it's moving up the chain there.
The other thing that the Discovery Channel and those folks want is they want to know
which corporations are interested in sponsoring this, which is the same problem that the stations
would have.
So in order to pitch something like this to the big sponsors, the consumer products companies
like General Motors or McDonald's or Coke, you have to have some very high level graphics
ready to show them.
you can see how long it's taken me to explain this thing verbally.
Of course.
But you can do it with a video in, you know, 30 seconds.
They get the whole picture.
Oh, yes?
And that's one of the things that we wanted to do with the original sponsorship money here that we're angling around for from Carnival and actually the shipyards in the United States.
All six of them are interested in sponsoring us in this effort.
So this would be all private sector.
It would generate hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Let me ask you this, Gene.
We've got to go to the phones, but I'm dying here.
If we committed to this, let us say, a year from today, with a full commitment, we're going to do it, you have the companies in line, all of it done, how long before the first passengers would be launched?
The first habitable external tank could go up in about 18 months.
Wow.
That would be the first one that would have these modifications on it, you know, so that it would be completely self-sufficient.
Right.
And by the way, it would have about ten times the, about eight times the interior volume of the Freedom Space, or the Alpha, or the International Space Station that NASA's trying to build now.
And as everybody listens to the figures here, remember the International Space Station is now said to cost about $80 billion.
$80 billion!
And we're talking about fractions, I mean fractions of that amount of money to get 300 people up there at a time.
And it's private money.
You know, I think the taxpayers should support NASA as far as the deep space probes that they're doing and developing initial vehicles like the space shuttles.
But then private industry should step in and take it over and run with it.
And that's what's been lacking.
There's no space line company the way there are airline companies.
You know, the aerospace companies build the airlines for Delta, and Delta is the one that figures out what the passengers want or the cargo people want.
You know, it takes the craft from the aerospace companies and markets it to the public.
There's nothing like that in the space industry, right?
Just like 2001, you'd be able to sit in a little booth and talk home, wouldn't you?
Yeah, sure, sure.
So the first habitable tank could go up in about 18 months.
As the assembly sequence went ahead, what you would have to have is two or three of these Individual tanks that would act as construction shacks for the guys that were building the ring.
Sure.
So, uh, the first tank that went up would be sort of a test article that would, you'd be able to test the, uh, you know, the solar controls, some of these connections that we were talking about, what would be the best interior to put on the walls.
Uh, you know, they've looked at three or four different, uh, uh, types of, uh, of padding that would go on the walls.
One of them is a kind of a self-sealing material that in case there's a puncture, this stuff
would sort of ooze out the hole the way it does in a self-sealing tire.
You could work all that out with the first and second of these tanks and then the construction
crew would start assembling the secondary tanks that would come up for the ring.
The construction of the ring itself would probably be a three-year project.
So what I was getting at was it would be possible that I could go up in my lifetime.
Oh sure, you could go up until you hit 60 if anybody had any luck.
One last thing.
In fact if I have anything to say about it I do.
I hear you.
Now, believe me, I could get a group together.
No problem.
You could do it with these cruises.
You know, going to Alaska and that, you could do the same thing with this.
I absolutely could.
I mentioned space sickness.
Now, how many people in space, in zero-g, get sick?
With all the training and pre-screening and everything to do with the astronauts, still about half of them get sick.
So in other words, if people found they were getting sick in zero G, they could simply make their way to the outer part of the ring where they've got at least half gravity, and I take it that would end that.
Right, exactly.
That's one of the advantages of having even a partial gravity, you know, living quarters close by.
Plus, they could You know, these spokes of the wheel?
Yes.
As they moved up those, you could have elevators that very slowly moved them up, and if they started getting sick, they could just turn the thing around and head back home to the ring.
All right, all right.
I've got to go to the phones, so let us do that.
There was one other thing.
The fax was asking about an Internet page.
We set up an internet page as a test of this idea about a year and a half ago.
Right.
And it ended up being aimed at high school students, a number of teachers who helped us put it together.
Right.
And we were so swamped by inquiries from teachers and students about projects that they wanted to develop to see what it would be like to live aboard these stations that we couldn't come close to keeping up with the volume.
We had 3,000 schools in 40 countries that had anywhere from 100 to 200, actually 100 to 500
students in each school that were developing projects on this.
One group was figuring out, one group in Kansas, in DeSoto, Kansas was figuring out how you
could grow wheat and corn and chickens on board, which is something that Kansas farmers
like.
They were competing with another high school in Taiwan.
Well, Gene, listen to me.
I've got the king of all webmasters, Keith Rowland, and he could put something together
Oh, that would be wonderful.
I should put you in touch with Keith and I can do that, all right?
Okay, good.
That would be really wonderful because we have the text.
We have some stunning graphics of what these things look like.
Oh.
And, you know, we've got photographs of the tanks as they're being built with people walking around inside them so you get the sense of the size of these things.
Can you get me initially some photographs and graphics?
Sure.
Because I can get them up on my website.
If you want to tell me what is the best way to get this over to you, do you want to do
this now?
Well, do you have people who can actually do it now?
What, send some photographs?
GIF, JPG, that kind of thing?
No, actually I don't.
Not tonight.
This is a little late for my guy.
Alright, fine.
We will do it tomorrow.
Okay.
Alright?
I can give you a call and... Yeah, you give me a call tomorrow and we'll set all this up, okay?
Okay.
Alright, we're on the fly here.
That's how you do radio.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hello.
Is that me?
That's you.
Where are you?
This is Icos Validar.
I'm really excited about your project here.
I'm actually involved with our church organization in creating a raffle to give away 1,000 trips to space in 1999.
We have a website I'll tell you what, sir, I don't allow web addresses to be given out without first checking them out, so you'll have to give them to me privately.
All right.
That sounds good.
Because I send people inadvertently off to a couple of porno sites, so I don't do that anymore.
Not very good.
No, no, no, no.
Well, we've decided to get behind this because it is something that I think that all the people of the earth want to have happen.
Thank you.
I think the man's idea of a raffle would allow people who ordinarily would never be able to afford it to go, wouldn't it?
Well, that was one of the pitches that we were making to Carnival and these other cruise lines, is that if they got involved in the initial sponsorship, we could sign an agreement with them so that a certain number of sort of a lottery-style offering to their current customers, their current
passengers, to have perhaps one out of a thousand or one out of ten thousand get a free pass to
the stations in six or seven years when they are ready.
So that was one of the things that we thought Carnival in particular, since they are the
largest in the industry, they own Holland America and several of the other ones, that
that's something that they would pick up on.
And that's again one of the reasons that if your listeners were interested in calling
Carnival...
Listen, I've got connections at Carnival.
Oh, there you go.
But you've got a number for Carnival, a public number, I take it?
Right.
It's an 800 number.
I figure your folks have already spent enough money developing the shuttles.
But it's their 800 number down in Miami.
And when you call this number, you sort of get one of those automated I don't see why they should.
That's their job.
I always just hit the button that says I don't have a touchstone phone and I get a real person
and then I ask for the PR department.
That's where you want to go because they are the ones that sort of have the ear to the
ground on this and have been waiting for...
So you can call the PR department at Carnival?
Yes.
I can give you the number if you'd like.
Well, do you think they'll get angry?
I don't see why they should.
I mean that's their job.
But it's your call.
I was originally thinking of having people called travel agents.
Having people call the local travel agents.
The only problem I saw with that is that the local travel agent is going to just, you know, they've got a busy day.
They're trying to make money and they're just going to discard this without calling the other cruise lines.
They're going to think it's Nut City.
Well, that's a possibility.
I thought that if the callers called the travel agents said they heard about it on the show and they understood that Carnival or one of the cruise lines was at least discussing the possibility of supporting these stations sometime in the future.
All right, let me ask you this.
You approached Carnival.
Right.
And they said to you, I'm sitting here trying to decide whether to give out their 800 number, they said to you that they wanted public input on whether people like the idea.
Right.
I went through the PR department and the marketing department and they looked at the proposal and they said, well, I can understand why this would be something we'd get involved with, but we don't want to be seen as kooks.
That's what it comes down to.
There's nothing kooky about this.
Yeah, no, there isn't in this.
You know, to a cruise line.
And remember, when I made the presentation to Carnival, it was with pretty much static graphics and, you know, some of the articles that had been done in the papers around Florida and talking about the concept and how the entertainment industry and the cruise ship industry could get involved.
So they could see that it was given serious coverage by substantial newspapers around the country.
But I didn't have the, you know, the computer animated graphics to go ahead and give them a Hollywood level pitch.
That's one of the things that we would do with the initial sponsorship money.
But since NASA itself has been saying that, you know, that the cruise ship companies are the ones that would be the most logical operators of stations like this under contract, it seemed to me that it was something that they should look at.
The two, you know, I mentioned Harrison, the fellow that sort of is the biggest stockholder in Carnival.
Yes.
And Dickerson, their president, they travel a great deal.
And the staff said that They keep having the staff members go over this and it looks intriguing, but they're waiting for some sort of feedback from those guys.
Gene, let me think about this a little bit, alright?
Because if we give out, there's so much excitement about this, if we were to give out the 800 number, we would probably cause their business to come to a halt for several days.
And that might make them very angry at us.
Sure, I understand that this, you know, the whole point of this is to get something that will help Carnival financially.
If they think it'll boost their traffic and, you know, give them an edge maybe over the other cruise lines, as far as offering something to their passengers, I mean, they could have full-size, very detailed models of these stations on board some of their cruises.
Well, look, I'm telling you, it's within the financial realm of these companies, and I know that because I was on the MS MosDom here recently, and I asked how much the MosDom costs to build.
And without giving you an exact figure, it was in the many hundreds of millions of dollars.
Right.
They usually run $400 to $800 million.
That's exactly right.
And these are the kinds of figures that we're talking about ultimately as this project gets going.
And the other thing is that Carnival has a pretty big marketing budget.
They do a lot of television advertising.
Oh, tremendous!
Carnival, Holland America, and all of that.
So to them, You know, taking a little slice out of the marketing budget to tie it into this, considering the worldwide coverage they would get as the first initial, you know, cruise ship company that was looking into this and funding some detailed engineering studies and, you know, that kind of thing, I think that it'd just be enormous PR alone for them, plus, you know, what it would do for their passengers.
Your idea makes so much sense that maybe the way we should approach this is for you to
give out a number that people in the press, magazines, newspapers, they're going to love
this kind of story.
They're absolutely going to be in love with it.
USA Today is putting together a story for it that should run in the next week and a
half.
Oh, no kidding.
Yeah, I spoke with Paul Hoverson, the space writer.
He's one of these guys that's been following me for years.
What I've been trying to do is bring this thing together.
So is there a phone number which we could give out next hour which the press could contact you at?
Sure, I can give a number here where I can be reached.
I run the office out of West Covina, California.
All right, all right.
All right, good.
Then we'll do that next hour, and we'll really, honestly, folks, dive into the thrones, I promise, next hour.
Gene Myers is my guest.
His project, Space Islands.
We'll be right back.
Hey.
Hartwell is taking your calls on the wildcard line at area code 702-727-1295.
Bye.
That's area code 702-727-1295.
First time callers may reach out at area code 702-727-1222.
First time callers may reach Art at area code 702-727-1222.
702-727-1222.
702-727-1222.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is.
Tomorrow night, or more likely tonight actually, Whitley Streeper will be my guest.
And Whitley, boy has Whitley got something for you, and I'm not even going to give it away.
That's tomorrow night.
Then Monday night, Tuesday morning, it's going to be David Adair.
Remember David?
David's a rocket scientist.
As a matter of fact, a friend of Gene's.
And guess what?
David just called.
And while he doesn't have computer presentations of the photographs available yet, David Adair just faxed me a conceptual picture of this space station, this tourist paradise that would circle our globe.
And what I did is I took the fax and held it up in front of my studio live cam.
So if you want to see what it would look like, go on up to my website right now and click on the studio live studio cam and you will see it is www.artbell.com.
Again my guest Gene Myers, the idea absolutely out of this world and we're going to get your calls and we'll take calls A lot of calls here coming up this hour, I promise.
All right, all right, all right.
Back now to my guesswork, that I really try to lay into the phones very heavily.
It's not easy to do because there are so many questions, and just one more comes to mind.
And that is this.
Again, it's a very sensitive subject.
NASA doesn't talk about sex in space, but obviously, Obviously, it's going to be something widely explored by anybody who could manage to get on board this luxurious space station that you have planned.
Do you have, is there any way that we can talk about it here on the air?
Any conception, any idea of what sex in space would be like compared to sex down here on the ground?
I've actually given probably more thought to this than I should have, but a lot of people that have asked me about this, this is one of the first questions, well not the first, probably the third question that comes up after they get to know me a little bit.
I would think that just from a sensation point of view, Being able to float with absolutely nothing touching you.
No walls or no bed sheets or not floating in water.
Having no contact with anything on your skin except the touch of your partner would be incredible.
I think it would just magnify the sensations.
Even something as simple as a kiss.
Closing your eyes and being touched in different places.
By this person, with no other physical contact going on at all, would be, I would think, astounding.
You can, you know, the positions, you can pretty much leave that up to your imagination.
In fact, I spoke with a television producer a couple of days ago, when I told him that the first of these habitable tanks could be ready in about 18 months, he asked if these zero-g suites might be set up inside that.
And I said, yeah, that would be a test case to go ahead and do different layouts for those zero-g rooms.
and he said would it be possible to, what it came down to is he wanted to do a two hour video
on sex in space, but do it in a very refined sort of way.
There'd be a lot of preparations for the flight and what the suites would look like
and what the eventual ring station would look like and that sort of thing.
But then he wanted to know if it'd be possible if the first construction crews that went up
to actually send up one or two couples whose main purpose on the station
would be to go through these different romantic possibilities
It'd be a rough job, but somebody'd have to do it.
Well, yeah, it would.
It would.
And he sort of envisioned something that was a couple of steps beyond what you see on NYPD.
You know, something that was, you know, that was artistically done, not just some, you know, some porno.
No, of course not.
Of course not.
No.
I would think, you know, that kind of thing with the earth floating in the background and, you know, he thought that something like that might sell 50 to 75 million copies around the world.
Because, you know, at 40 or 50 bucks a pop, which he thought would be enough to pay for that whole first, uh, first habitable tank.
Wow.
So see, these are the kind of revenue streams that would never cross NASA's mind.
What about a shower?
Uh, the showers and the toilets that they have on the shuttle, because they're zero G and the ones they had on the old Skylab, are very difficult to use.
The showers are basically a tube that sprays the water down over your head and then there's
a fan down by your feet that sucks the water down. The toilets, if you look at that movie 2001 and
see the scene where he's trying to figure out how to use the zero-g toilet, it's even more
complicated than that. NASA spent 35 million dollars developing a zero-g space toilet for the
shuttle.
Even at sea, it's difficult.
The toilets at sea, there's a big warning, you know.
It says, you know, do not flush while sitting there, because this thing is like... It sounds like a rocket launching when it flushes.
They're like that on trains, too.
I got caught in trouble a couple of years ago.
First time I tested the Amtrak waters, in quite a few years. So the toilets for the shuttles and
for the zero g portions of the station that's why the ring would come in so handy you know
for running out there for that.
But their shuttle ones are basically a kind of a wet dry shop vac that you sit on that's what it
comes down to. You have fans in there and they and they sort of suck the material the air around you
you know get sucked in there along with the material and then it's stored in these little
plastic bags and they have to bring it back.
But I would imagine a shower in a quarter G or a half G would be really neat.
Yeah.
One interesting thing that they have to do on the shuttles is when the astronauts sleep they have to have fans blowing across their face because without gravity the carbon dioxide they exhale will not sink to the floor.
It actually forms a mask over their face and it could kill them.
So these are sort of ventilation expenses that you have in a zero-g station like the International Station.
That would not be necessary in at least the rain portion of the station.
All right, let's go back to the phones.
A lot of people waiting, and I don't want to keep them waiting.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hello.
Greetings, gentlemen.
Very interesting subject you're obsessed with there.
I think if you want to save some production costs on a video, just look at Roger Morris' old James Bond movie.
I think you've got your beat.
Interesting that you're talking about some of the hazards.
And by the way, this is John in Scottsdale.
Uh, one thing I was curious about, and since you mentioned, uh, possibly doing some CIS lunar and other types of flights, uh, I would, I would assume that if, of necessity, the walls of these tanks would be lightweight and relatively thin, how would you protect the passengers in the event of something like a solar flare or the radiation that would bounce?
Very, very, very good question.
Well, the walls of the external tank, because the external tank is so strong, you know, it's designed to hold this liquid fuel, The walls are, in most portions of the walls, they're about four times thicker than the walls in the International Space Station or the Mir space station.
Really?
Right.
And they're about probably 25 times thicker than the walls of an airliner.
So it's quite, they're a quarter of an inch, well actually about a half inch to five eighths of an inch thick.
So they're very, very rigid.
The shuttle cannot stand up on its tail by itself.
It's actually bolted to the external tank, so the tank acts as a kind of an I-beam that, you know, holds the shuttle rigid.
Gotcha.
It's that strong, so the radiation issue would be minimized.
It would be safer than, for instance, what the Apollo guys had to go through on the way out and back.
Okay, Gene, answer this for me.
You've got this station at several hundred miles.
In orbit.
Right.
How would you get this, what would it take to get the station propelled toward the moon in a cruise condition?
So you would be cruising for, I don't know, two and a half, three days, however long it took to get to the moon, and then cruise for a while around the moon, just a few miles above it, you said, and then back to Earth again.
Well, what you'd want to do is you'd have, actually, the shuttle engines, the engines that are on the base of the shuttle, That same type of engine would be attached to the ring at four or eight locations around the ring.
And then at least one or two more in that central column.
And those would all be sort of computer controlled.
And they would fire the ring as it was rotating.
And you'd want to have as slow a motion as possible to get started.
Because you wouldn't want to stress the connections and even the passengers.
So you would build velocity very slowly?
Yeah, you'd build velocity slowly.
The figures I've seen on the fuel requirements are about twice as much fuel as it takes to get all of the tanks in orbit in the first place.
You can actually fly the space shuttle to the moon and back if you had an additional external tank full of fuel sitting in orbit.
The shuttle could drop off the empty tank that it used to get into orbit, then attach itself to this.
Could you keep one of these stations consistently going between the Earth and the Moon?
Yeah, that would be the most economical way to do it as far as fuel goes.
You'd burn up a lot of fuel getting it up to this velocity and then you could set it
in this sort of automatic figure eight trajectory where it would go up to the moon and swing
around the back of the moon and come back out and break out on its own or with a very,
very slight expenditure of fuel, break out and head back for the Earth.
And it would just keep going around and around and around the Earth.
So that station would in effect be an endless ferry that could carry people to the moon
and back and it'll take 45 minutes to swing around the backside of the Earth and that's
when you would transfer the passengers onto or off of shuttles that would drop them back
And if there was eventually moon bases set up, you could drop them off as you spun around the back.
You're pretty serious about this, aren't you?
Oh yeah, and it's, you know, this stuff was, those of us that grew up in the 50s and 60s, this is what we lived for.
I mean, Disney was talking about this, and Wernher von Braun is the guy that proposed these ring-shaped space stations in the first place, back in 1956 and 55.
So there was nothing new about it.
It's just sort of going back and revisiting what Hollywood really has been selling us since the 50s.
Except in a totally practical sense.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Good morning.
Oh, a couple of things.
First off, why in the world did the United States get involved with Russia on this space venture with their inferiority in technology?
All right.
It's a good question.
Indeed, they're broke.
They're having trouble keeping up with their end of the deal.
Why did we get involved with it?
The original reason that Gore had for this was about three years ago, he went to Turner Meriden, the guy that was in charge of, he was like the Prime Minister of Russia.
He wasn't the President, but he was the next guy down.
Gore and Clinton were worried about Russia selling their rocket technology to Iran and Iraq and those countries.
So they made an agreement with them that if they let the Russians come into the space station project that Russia would agree not to sell their technologies to these possibly troublemaking Arab states over there.
But that was never put in writing.
So the space station was actually redesigned three years ago The bottom line answer is politics.
in it. They took as many components as they could salvage from the old design, which was
called originally Freedom and then Alpha, and they redid it in the International Space
Station and built some of the Russian pieces into it. But it turned out that Chairman Mirdon
was just not able to keep his word. So the bottom line answer is politics.
Oh, bad idea. Yeah, it was strictly politics.
The guys at NASA, including Golden, apparently hated the idea.
They just, for exactly the reasons that you pointed out, they knew that the Russian technology was behind ours and trying to coordinate something like this among all of these different countries.
Now, they've got Japan and Canada and, you know, the Europeans involved.
It's just turned into a real rat race.
I know, and a horrid amount of money.
Caller, anything else?
Yes, yes, yes.
A couple of things.
Are you the gentleman who built the explosive device to activate car airbags?
Geez.
Pretty good, buddy.
No, I'm not the guy that built it, but I worked for the company that used to do that.
Did you really?
This is why I'm wondering.
I talked with him maybe five to ten years ago, and he wrote a book about this.
He wanted to build a space station using these fuel tanks that had spent fuel out of them.
And keep them in space, put them together to build a platform for a space station and use them to manufacture things like communication crystals, bio-crystals, about 10,000 different kinds of metal alloys.
Right.
Do you all know who I'm talking about?
You work for a company in Southern California.
Yeah, it was a division of TRW.
that made airbags for cars and that sort of thing.
Well he told me to develop this little bullet thing that would explode.
Well yeah, we made the little sensors that trigger the airbags in the cars.
But yeah, that book was called E.T.
Solutions.
I wrote it back in about 1990.
And you, I believe, spent a six-year stint at the automotive division of TRW.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I did.
And I saw a lot of the aerospace guys that got sent over to us.
You know, when they had all the aerospace cutbacks, they transferred over to the automotive division.
I got a real good insight into how aerospace engineers develop things and how complicated some of the government procedures are for designing and purchasing things compared to the automotive industry where everything is trying to count nickels and dimes.
You know, get things developed in a matter of weeks instead of a matter of years.
And Gals, listen very carefully to this.
There is a biological effect when you go into space, described earlier, that you would like.
Would you explain that one more time?
Yeah, it turns out that all of the astronauts have gone through this, that in the absence of gravity, the blood that gravity normally pulls down to your legs and your thighs, drifts up into your chest and your face, And all of the astronauts that have gone up have noticed that their legs and thighs get noticeably thinner, and their chests expand by 2 to 3 inches because of this extra fluid that comes up.
And the same thing happens to their face.
It makes their faces rounder, and if they're guys in their 40s and 50s, the little H-lines and crow's feet and that sort of thing disappear because this extra fluid comes up.
I understand that Shannon Lucid, the woman astronaut that was up on the Russian station for about six months, she's 53, and when she got back she was commenting to people that she felt that being in zero-G shaved almost 20 years off of her appearance.
Wow.
When she was in orbit and then when she landed and before she took off all
Commented on how different she looked and they thought it was because her hair was flowing out
But but it wasn't they said oh she looks so happy and so contented and so well
She actually just looked younger and also guys What would be a 34 on the ground might be a 36 in space?
Well, yeah, because this blood flows up into these into the women's chest
We get the idea guys are about two or three inches taller.
We'll be right back Oh
I Love you
I I
Oh I
I I
I I
I see trees of green Oh
Red roses too.
I see them bloom for me and you.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
To talk with Art Bell, from west of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico,
That's 1-800-618-8255.
Now again, here's Art.
Once again, here I am.
Aside from the obvious fun and erotic aspects of what taking a cruise in space or maybe even to the moon might bring, imagine Try and imagine if you can.
Looking back at the earth.
That's why I'm playing this.
Get you in that mood.
Looking back at the earth.
Watching the continents go by.
The rivers, the rain forest.
Try and imagine.
Just about reaching out.
He grabs it from the bone.
And touching the face of God.
What would that be worth?
Oh my.
I hear planes fly.
I watch them go.
They're like mushrooms.
And I...
What you're hearing tonight is not just pie in the sky.
It's entirely plausible, possible, practical and financially reasonable.
All we need is support and we're going to get to that part here in a minute.
I promise you in the next few days we will get high-res photographs of Uh, the graphic presentation of exactly what the space station will look like, but as a quick and dirty way, uh, bless his heart, David Adair, who's going to be my guest on Monday night, uh, sent me a couple of faxes.
These are just faxes of photographs and I held one of them up to my studio cam.
So if you want to see what it looks like, go to my website right now and hit, uh, which is www.artbell.com and take a look.
And in the next few days, we'll get some good high-res graphics up there.
If Gene or David would send them to me by next day, I don't know, FedEx or something, I will scan them myself and get them up on the website, I promise you.
From Greg, down at KABC, the flagship station of the ABC network in Los Angeles, My affiliate there.
Many congratulations, Art, on WABC beginning Monday.
Greg says, welcome home to where most of us Eastern radio heads grew up suckling on 77.
He's right.
I grew up listening to WABC as did I'm sure many of you from the East, so obviously we're looking forward to it.
In addition, We're also on 77, 770, if you will, in Albuquerque, and I was talking with the program director of WABC in New York, and he said, you know something, Art?
He said you would actually, from the islands of Hawaii and so forth, be able to listen to 77, you could hear Art Bell, from Hawaii all the way across the entire United States to New York and well out into the Atlantic.
On one frequency.
77.
And he's absolutely right.
All right, back now to Gene Myers.
Gene, before we go any further, if you've got a phone number, what I want to do is get you a lot of press.
Any magazine, any newspaper who doesn't want to write a story on this has got to be out of their circulation-grubbing minds.
So, give me a phone number.
Area code 626-338-3656.
Where is that?
That's in West Covina, California.
I've never heard of area code 626.
It's a new area code.
The area code that you called me at here was 818 and it's being split into 626 but for the next two or three months both area codes work so we're trying to It's outside of Los Angeles, about 30 miles east of L.A., close to Pomona, California.
I take it that you could supply a newspaper or a magazine or even a TV show.
For example, I have friends at Strange Universe and Hard Copy and all the rest of those.
They're going to be interested, I know.
You could supply with photographs and the entire story and we can get this moving.
So if you work for a media organization out there folks, this is what a 9-5 kind of number?
No, it's a home office number so it's available 24 hours a day, although there's a machine
here if there's nobody here to pick it up.
So they can usually get me here at most times of the day.
Okay, Gene.
Again, if you're in the media, folks, let's get this going.
And you can help.
And this will sell magazines.
This will sell TV programs.
This will get big ratings.
Believe me.
So if you're in the media, call Gene Myers at area code 626-338-3656.
626-338-3656. I'm going to say it again in case you're in the middle of the night there
scratching around for a pen and a paper.
It's area code 6-2-6-3-3-8-3-6-5-6.
And he's Gene Myers, the guy with the idea.
All right, back to it we go.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Where are you calling from, please?
New Hartford, New York.
I got a quick question and then I got a comment for you.
I want to know how you're going to get those things up there because if you use them, Just, you know, blast them off.
How are you going to get rid of the residue of the spent fuel that's inside of there?
Okay.
And then the comment is this.
There's another point for the ladies.
In space, right, there's no gravity.
That's right.
So your body grows an inch.
I'll leave that up to your imagination.
Well, gravity... Okay, thank you very much, Young.
Gravity has always been the enemy of females, of course.
Obviously, yes.
Not only with the change in the blood flow of your body, which would produce interesting changes, there would be not the normal effects of gravity on our bodies.
Enough said.
Now, he asks about an important issue, which you said NASA mentioned.
How do you get the excess fuel out of these tanks?
Well, one solution was simply to vent it out, you know, to open the feed lines that take the fuel out of the tank and run it into the engines.
Simply let that, you know, let it bleed out into space.
That would take quite a bit of time, a matter of several days or perhaps a couple of weeks.
Another solution was to have two tanks sort of join them nose and very slowly spin them
so that the fuel would settle to the bottom of the tanks and then you could simply pump
The fuel is liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen and those are two things that would be very useful for the station.
Either as fuel or to combine to form water.
So you don't really want to throw the stuff away if you could use it.
There's been other plans to put a So it is not insurmountable.
No it isn't.
Alright Gene, I'm a ham radio operator.
That's been my passion all my life.
I'm a ham.
I love it.
out in a powdered form and separate it in a separate container.
But there's three or four very technically sound ways of getting it.
So it is not insurmountable?
No, it isn't.
Alright, Gene, I'm a ham radio operator.
That's been my passion all my life.
I'm a ham.
I love it.
And I have always wanted to operate ham radio from an airplane.
But as you well know, when you get on an airplane, first thing they tell you is, no cellular
phones, no two-way radios, turn them off, blah blah blah, fly by wire.
Anyway, you know, it might interfere with our navigation.
Now, listen, let me tell you, Gene, taking a handheld radio for a ham radio operator into orbit, um, that's almost as good as sex, Gene.
And it seems to me that there would not be the same navigational difficulties present in space.
And do you suppose they might let Hams go up there and operate?
Yeah, I don't see any reason why not.
You wouldn't be in any orbits where you'd interfere with even the cellular phone systems, you know, that are satellites that would be up there servicing those.
It'd probably have to be constrained a little bit.
But until you got 50 or 75 of these stations up there, you certainly wouldn't have any
interference problems from anybody else that I could see.
And that could happen.
Originally NASA was planning on taking 1,000 of these external tanks up.
They thought that they would have 8 or 10 shuttles in the fleet and they would need
a total of 1,000 of these tanks.
And that could very easily happen if this commercial venture gets going once the real
world finds out about it and the heavy hitters step into it.
All right.
Well, we'll make that happen.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hello.
Hi Art and Gene.
This is Dave from Mack, Colorado.
Hi Dave.
Hey, one thing about having sex in space, I think I'd want a padded room or a helmet because I don't know about you guys, but I'd be slamming all around that room.
That's what bungee cords are for.
Bungee cords.
Listen Gene, I had a question about the logistics of the turnaround time.
I know with a shuttle, if I remember right, it takes about seven months or almost up to a year to turn one shuttle around, is that right?
It's pretty long.
They've gotten it down now to about four, I think four or five months is the shortest for each one of the four shuttles that they have.
That's one of the reasons I keep talking about these second-generation shuttles.
They know exactly why it takes so long to, you know, recondition these things and get them ready for flight, and they would design a lot of those time-consuming operations out of the second-generation shuttles.
The goal would be to have a turnaround time of one to two weeks.
As far as I know, I thought that the turnaround time was just that the shuttle has to land horizontally, then they have to take that shuttle to the assembly building, Stand it upright, attach the boosters to the tank, attach the whole thing to the tank, and then move it out of the assembly building to the launch pad.
Just that process is what takes so much time.
Yeah, that's one of the very time-consuming aspects of it.
Another is that they literally have to pull out a lot of the guts of the shuttle and replace it on each flight because some of the original components were not designed for You know, to last anywhere near 20 years.
That whole fleet was only supposed to be in operation for 5 to 10 years, and then they were supposed to be replaced.
So you're saying all of this could be vastly improved in a second generation, which would be about a quarter of the price?
Right.
The Russians had some... They actually built a space shuttle called Buran.
They only had one of them, and they launched it unmanned because they didn't have the life support systems finished inside.
but they had some very good ideas about assembling these things horizontally, which would make
a lot of sense for the passengers.
They'd lay down the boosters and the external tank and then sort of lower the shuttle on
it with the same sort of cranes that move cargo off of ships and then simply tilt the
thing up on the launch pad and away it goes.
It wouldn't be something they could do in a couple of minutes or a couple of hours,
but it would certainly cut the preparation time down by several weeks.
Right.
How is that, is it the Xenastar that's going to turn into?
The X-33 is a prototype.
Right.
It's a prototype for what they hope will be a space plane.
Even Vice President Gore has said that that thing is supposed to be commercially ready to carry tourists into space by 2005.
But none of those guys, Clinton or Gore or even Gingrich, talk about where the tourists are going to go.
The space plane, that X-33 that you're talking about, will only hold about... The commercial version will hold somewhere between 25 and 50 passengers.
But it's going to be pretty expensive to operate because it will not have an external tank that could be sold in orbit.
The thing is going to take off, you know, like a regular plane in an airplane.
Yeah, everybody bear in mind that this external tank could be sold once it reaches orbit instead of thrown back into the ocean, reentering and burning up and destroying itself and going into the ocean.
It could be sold for enough money to actually more than pay for The launch.
More than pay for the launch.
Bear that in mind.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hi.
Great.
Thanks, Art.
Hi, Gene.
Hi.
First of all, I got a conceptual idea that maybe I'd get Gene's take on it for the space station.
In your opinion, Gene, why would it or wouldn't it be possible to design an inflatable space station specifically designed to absorb energy of, let's say, micrometeors and docking mishaps?
Not unlike the Bulletproof Vest that for the most part would essentially eliminate the Well, there's been a number of studies done on inflatable stations.
I think one area that they're concerned with is the radiation protection you could get through any kind of an inflatable wall.
It wouldn't have the mass that a heavy external tank would have.
Well, if you didn't give it the mass, it wouldn't have it.
Right, right.
But that wouldn't be enough to slow down some of the solar radiation that is there in orbit.
Yeah, that's a very important point.
You've got to be protected.
How, under your conceptual space station, would you create an emergency design protocol aside from the thrusters to avoid collision scenarios?
All right.
The thrusters would be the main component of any sort of evasive action that the station might have to take.
It would be linked to a pretty extensive radar system that would be able to see out perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 miles.
So you'd have some warning of what would be coming in.
There actually is quite a bit of matter that zips past the Earth between the Earth and the Moon.
Hey Gene, here's an issue that people would be concerned about.
We are told constantly, even though we hear about a lot of air crashes, and we've had a very bad time lately, that flying remains much, much safer than driving.
Right.
Now, people would ask, suppose I take a shuttle flight to the station, spend a month up there, and come back.
What are my chances?
Well, there's been, you know, millions of airline flights over the last Fifty years or so since commercial airlines got started.
Probably 75 years by now.
Right.
So you've got a long history to point back to.
As far as the shuttles go, all you can say is that we've launched 90 of them and one of them blew up and they fixed that problem.
So there shouldn't be any more blowups from that cause anymore.
But it's hard to sit down and say, well, you're going to have probably a thousand launches before something happens.
My feeling is that these second generation shuttles could be designed in a far safer
way as far as the passengers go.
You notice when the Challenger blew up, I don't know if most people know this, but the
compartment up front of the crew cabin separated from the shuttle and the crew of the Challenger
were actually alive until they hit the water.
I know, that's something they don't talk about.
Yeah, so it seemed to me that these kind of breakaway cargo sections that I was talking about, if they were designed into the shuttle so that if anything did go wrong, those things could blow away with the passengers inside.
It would be sort of like the compartments that they have for fighter planes that fly at very high altitudes.
It's not that the canopy blows back and they go out into space.
The whole cockpit blows out.
And I think that sort of safety thing could be designed into the second generation shuttles.
There may be an explosion.
It's a tricky vehicle.
I think getting rid of the solid rocket boosters and putting liquids over there would give you a lot more control because you could shut the engines down, which you can't do with the solids.
You know, having the breakaway cargo section would be a kind of a secondary thing.
You know, with his own parachutes and that sort of thing.
All right, Gene, hold on.
We're still not done with you.
I know you must be getting tired, but we're not getting tired of hearing about it.
So there will be more.
And again, to borrow from the movie Contact, folks.
Remember this?
Wanna take a ride?
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Yesterday I cried.
Must have been relieved to see this off to size.
I can understand how you'd be so confused.
I don't envy you.
I'm a little bit of everything.
All rolling through one.
I'm a bitch.
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Art Bell is talking to first-time callers at area code 702-727-1222.
That's area code 702-727-1222.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
That's area code 702-727-1222.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
Now again, here's Art.
It just fits.
Gene Myers is here, and he has a plan to take us to space in the next few years.
forget that. Can you imagine in your lifetime soon going to space, going to orbit, going to the moon?
Wanna go?
Oh man, what a subject. Gene Myers is here and he has a plan to take us to space in the next
few years. I'm talking about a luxurious cruise ship kind of stay in space for a couple of weeks,
maybe a month, or maybe around the moon and back in our lifetimes.
It can be done.
It really can be done.
This is not pie in the sky.
This is absolutely possible.
We'll tell you more about it in a moment.
We're keeping him up way past his bedtime, I'm sure.
For me.
Gene Myers is my guest.
He's telling us how we can get to space in our lifetimes, as a matter of fact, in a few years.
I don't know.
This is so exciting for me, and I'm sure it must be the same way for you.
Now, again, What I want, I think, what I think needs to happen, and I've been sort of mulling this over in my mind, this idea is so dynamic, so interesting, that all we really need do is make Gene, Gene Myers, available to the press, magazines, newspapers, television shows,
This is a fantastic idea, and all we need to do is get the idea out there, and the rest will occur automatically.
So, Gene, one more time, if you wouldn't mind, give out the number the press could call you at.
Area code?
Area code 626-338-3656.
626-338-3656.
Okay, and you'd be willing to, for example, do interviews?
Yep, interviews.
I've done quite a number of lectures on this idea to groups ranging from elementary schools up to senior citizens.
And you're right, it strikes a chord with the general public largely, I think, because of the expectations Hollywood has raised in people for these, you know, these big, dramatic, ring-shaped stations.
Well, listen, are the expectations unreal?
In other words, Would the experience of a space flight live up to the expectations that we all have built up in our mind?
I think it would exceed it.
I think it would far exceed it because there's literally nothing on Earth that compares to it.
You know, getting these cruise lines involved is kind of interesting.
I noticed the Royal Caribbean's cruise line, their tag line on their Absolutely!
their commercials is like no vacation on earth.
If Carnival picked this up they could use that same line with and beyond tacked on to
the end of it.
I also got an interesting call just a minute ago from a fellow named Jim over in Chicago
who works in PR and he pointed out that the casinos in Vegas might also be interested
in this.
Absolutely.
Because technically it is beyond the 200 mile limit so you have some real potential
there plus the wheels look so much like roulette wheels to start with.
But those high rollers, you know, the $2,000 and $5,000 a night gang that stays at the Vegas penthouses, would probably be the very first people that would actually shell out some heavy bucks to go up to them.
Oh, look, I can think of people in all kinds of categories, not just the high rollers, Tom Hanks, you know, as big a fan as he is of space.
against Bill Gates, there would be plenty of customers, believe me, and that would of
course pave the way for more traffic, cheaper seats.
Tom Hanks, as big a fan as he is of space, when he was doing Apollo 13 he gave several
interviews where he said this has been his dream since he was a little kid.
Guys like him and folks in the entertainment industry would just, I think they would be
tripping over themselves to sign up for something like this if they were reasonably certain
I agree.
A million people want to talk to you.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hi.
Hi, this is Melody from Medford.
Oh, hi Melody.
Hi.
Yeah, I'm up in Cope Country.
Yeah, what I was wondering is, would it be possible, or will you be thinking of selling stock to the public?
How we could get a hold of you?
And whether you thought of contacting companies for donation of parts and services, since I don't believe the antitrust laws operate in space.
Yeah, we've thought about issuing stock.
Frankly, we'd like to keep this under a little tighter control in the beginning here.
If you're in stock for an idea that's at this early stage, it's a pretty tough thing to
do.
At this point, as Art was pointing out, the thing that could be most helpful is simply
the word of mouth publicity, having folks that are listening to the show call their
local papers and the magazines that they might know or the TV stations, telling them about
this and asking them to get in touch with me.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, there you go, everybody.
I hope you have personally taken down that number.
I forgot about that.
All of you out there listening, take that number down, call your local newspaper and have them get hold of Gene Myers.
That number is area code 626-338-3656.
And it's been my dream all my life to be able to do something like this.
And it's been my dream all my life to be able to do something like this.
And frankly, Gene, I have begun to conclude that it would not be possible in my lifetime.
Now, after hearing you, I think it is.
I know it is.
I mean, this is not some passing fancy for me.
I've spent 15 years going over this thing in detail, and there's no problem with the engineering now that the shuttles are working quite well.
There's no problem getting up there.
The problem is just getting the public to know about it.
And once the public gets excited, then the marketing departments of these sponsoring companies are going to be tripping over themselves, I think, to jump on board.
I couldn't agree more.
Anything else, ma'am?
No, I was just curious as to whether he had thought about going to these companies.
You spoke of Bill Gates.
I was wondering if... It's very tough for a guy like me, a fairly small fish, to get very far up in the...
In the Microsoft Organization, I've also approached Nike about this, but the first thing they look for is how much public interest is there.
Who knows about this already?
They want the ship to set sail and then they want to get on board, which I understand.
They must get a thousand proposals a week for You know, flashy ideas that people say will make them a million bucks.
Well, I sat here scratching my head about the best way to do this, and then you thought of calling the booking companies, the tourist travel agents and so forth.
Then I thought of calling directly to the cruise lines, but they're already thinking about it.
I think the best way to go about this is to get a ton of publicity.
And that'll push it.
That'll push it like nothing else could.
Oh yeah, it's kind of a self-igniting idea.
You know, once they see some of these pictures, like the one that David faxed you... Well, just wait till we get the high-definition photos up.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hello.
Hello there, it's great to speak to both of you.
Where are you, sir?
I am in Birmingham, Alabama.
I was wondering, Gene, if any of your efforts on this project take you to Huntsville, Alabama?
Yeah, as a matter of fact, the external tanks were designed at Huntsville.
The Skylab station, I think, was primarily designed through Huntsville.
The Huntsville Space Center is probably the one NASA center that would be most enthusiastic about this, but they're being kept on a kind of a short leash by NASA headquarters and by the Johnson Space Center.
There's a lot of politics going on inside NASA, but a lot of the studies on I'm a resident of Huntsville until recently and one thing that I do know is that the Discovery Channel founder is a University of Alabama Huntsville graduate and now lives in Huntsville so from the publicity point of view if you make a trip to Huntsville you might want to arrange a meeting with
That's a very good point.
I think now that NASA is cutting back on all their funding and encouraging their centers to start looking at commercial ideas, I think there might There might be something there.
But again, the sponsorship is what's going to make the difference.
The money that comes from the sponsorship, and that's going to be driven by the public interest.
Well, this has got to be the king of all space commercial ideas.
Oh, sure.
So, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hi.
Yes, this is Vince in Chicago.
Hi, Vince.
Yeah, Art, this is a really exciting idea.
It is.
I really think it's going to work.
The lady earlier, the lady there, she had mentioned the stock offering.
I think that it's really an idea whose time has come.
Considering how Netscape has done and some of these other IPOs, new stock offerings, I think it's really an idea.
I think the market could sell it.
I think the public would buy into this.
The first space company operating in space.
I don't know my way around financial mechanisms like this too much.
I've had a couple of people explain to me what real estate investment trusts are, these REITs.
Actually, there are a couple of big ones based right up there in Chicago.
These are groups of investors that put their money together to buy commercial buildings
and then the building will be leased out either as a hotel or as a manufacturing thing or
an office complex.
But that mechanism, it's got some real tax advantages to it and they think that a space
station could actually be financed using these REITs, using this type of approach, which
is a little simpler than the stock market offerings.
So there are some mechanisms out there.
If there are any of our listeners that sort of move through those circles, I'd be more
than happy to talk to them and look at any suggestions they might have on how this financing
might be arranged that way.
Yeah, I think you should try to maintain control of this company and at some time bring it
into the stock market.
I think that would be a great idea.
I could just picture me, you and Richard Hoaglandhart six miles from the moon's surface surveying
the Apollo landing site and looking for those glass structures that Richard talks about.
That's just the Ben and Black haven't already gotten.
And hopefully not bumping into one of them.
Yes, indeed.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hi.
Hi.
This is the pool at San Fran.
Yes, sir.
I wanted to call A to ask a question.
How would one go about applying for a bartending position on one of these spaceships?
Well, that's going to be necessary.
I think that's one of these jobs that nobody connects with the space program the way it's set up now, but that's going to be perhaps one of the crucial ones, especially if space sickness gets involved, motion sickness.
We have to move this thing a little bit further ahead before we can set up a real structure with a sponsorship that can go to this company that is controlling the shuttles for NASA now, the United Space Alliance, and lay a proposal on the table with some initial financing.
Then they're going to take it seriously, and that's the point where we can start signing up people, and I think that could happen within a year.
And the second thing which I wanted to do was basically point out one of the reasons I think you might be having problems getting the attention for something like this or getting NASA to take you serious and that is think about currently how much is being suppressed about information coming back from space and the astronauts and stuff and how NASA and the powers that be would have no way to suppress it if the public got up there.
That's the whole idea.
I think there's That's been a kind of a mindset inside NASA for a long time, maybe 20 years or so, that they sort of want to control all of the stuff that goes on there.
I don't think that they've really discovered much that's secretive.
It's just that, you know, they're in the driver's seat and the astronauts have got this sort of aura about them.
And once you start getting tourists going up there, it's going to change the whole structure.
But I do think that Dan Golden, of all the guys that have been in charge of NASA, Golden is the one that is most enthusiastic about moving NASA out of this space shuttle and space station operation as quickly as Clinton Gore will let him go.
Hey Gene, I just had an idea.
I know how to get the astronauts behind this idea.
How's that?
Well, who would make the first and most logical captains for a station?
Oh, of course!
Yeah, you'd hire astronauts that you'd hire right off of NASA.
Because you need real trained people to pilot these things, the shuttles.
Well, just like commercial military pilots who retire and fly 747s.
Exactly.
Exactly, yeah.
And this would pay a lot more than, you know, the civil service money that they get.
Oh, you bet it would.
Plus, I think it could make them into media stars, much more than anything NASA has ever done since the party.
I know some astronauts.
I'll work on it.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hello.
Hello.
Thank you very much.
I was wondering if either one of you had heard of a related project that's going on for mass colonization of outer space called the First Millennial Foundation after the book by Marshall Savage.
Yes, I've heard of that and I've read Marshall's book and I've spoken with him a couple of times about this.
He's got a much sort of grander vision of what could happen as far as building very large space colonies.
Perhaps over the next 50 or 75 or 100 years.
You know, he takes a very long-term view of this, and I agree with all of the ideas that he has in there, but I think the first thing you have to do is get sort of your foot in the water, and business's commercial foot in the water in orbit, and I think that's what these external tanks could do.
I think that 50 years from now, the external tank station idea, the Space Islands idea, will probably be looked on as quaint, you know, the way we look at biplanes today.
Sure.
It's going to be crucial to get the ball rolling.
Certainly one of the intermediate steps that he talks about in the book is having a small station up there in order to provide us an initial capability, and I was wondering if some sort of coordination between the two groups would be valuable.
Well, that would be what the first habitable external tank, the first one or two of those that went up there, could become.
There'd be room on board for a very limited amount of tourism.
But there could also be room for initial materials processing and some of the other commercial activities that might go on.
It sounds like a number of people are trying to call me over at this same number.
That's what this call waiting beep is about.
All right.
Well, please, everybody, we don't hear the beep.
We just hear a brief interruption.
Everybody, please, don't call right now.
Hold on until at the very least after the program.
And better yet, Gene is going to be tired.
Call him tomorrow.
Yeah, not early.
Yeah, that's right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Good morning.
Yeah, I just had a quick comment and a question.
Okay.
Okay, first of all, for anyone who doesn't know, because the news coverage has been kind of spotty, Anton LaVey died on October 29th of this year.
Oh, I have not heard that.
Yeah, not many people did.
And second of all, I was wondering, these Yeah, I'd like to know the same thing myself.
Probably, uh, no smoking, I'm sure.
I think that's, uh, probably the way, uh, God, if I have anything to say about it, anyhow.
Well, you know, the smoke is purifying the atmosphere up there, re-cleaning the air.
It's going to be kind of crucial.
In that sense, it's going to be like a submarine.
Well, you finally actually hit on one thing that might cause me to quit.
It's tough.
I know my brother and his wife finally gave it up here a couple of months ago.
All right.
A little more to go, Gene, and we're all done.
Gene Myers is my guest, and he will be right back.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coastale.
The coast is clear, the water's clear, the wind's clear, the sea's clear, the air's clear,
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She's pure as New York snow.
She got baddies days aside Can she please you?
Still I need you Send your camel to bed
Shadows paintin' our faces Traces of romance in our heads
Heaven's holdin' our heads Moon is shinin' just for us
Let's slip off to a sad tune real soon Kick up a little dance
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Art Bell is taking your calls in the Kingdom of Nye from east of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
West of the Rockies including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico at 1-800-618-8255.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Now, here again is Art.
It is, and I keep interrupting Ross.
Sorry about that.
That's Ross, the voice of God.
Want to take a ride?
I'm never going to forget that in conduct.
It seems to apply.
Gene Myers is my guest, and we're talking about...
Space Island Projects.
Now, literally putting something up there, actually many somethings ultimately, that would accommodate 300 guests at once.
Two weeks, a month, circling the Earth in zero G or half G. How does that sound?
Maybe going to the moon.
Another one that you could hitch a ride with and go to the moon.
Literally skimming the surface of the moon and then returning to Earth.
All of this possible in a very few years.
For real, folks.
For real.
Not science.
Fiction.
But what could be science fact in a very, very short time.
So if you have any questions or comments for Gene, you're welcome to make them.
We've got a final segment coming up.
Absolutely.
Now, again, back to Gene Myers, who's probably getting heavy-lidded by now and beginning to slowly get tired, huh?
Well, I used to work graveyard and second shift for probably 15 of the last 20 years.
I really liked the night shift people.
Boy, me too.
The worst jobs I've ever had were the ones that paid the most, but I had to be there at 7 in the morning.
I'd kill to be able to get back on a night shift after those.
Ah, exactly so.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Good morning.
Good morning.
You're going to have to speak up good and loud.
Where are you calling from?
Oklahoma City.
Alright, go ahead.
Well, I had two questions.
One, you know, I was just wondering if, you know, like a scientist could, you know, go up there And maybe, you know, try some of those Einstein experiments looking for, you know, gravitational waves.
Well, all right.
You're asking about science.
And now, obviously, Gene, this would be an opportunity for real science to go on as well.
In other words, you would have so much space.
I mean, you're talking about a 747 times 12 or 14 or whatever.
So you wouldn't just be able to accommodate tourists, you'd be able to accommodate scientists.
As a matter of fact, what they really ought to do is take this International Space Station project, junk the damn thing, and do what you want to do.
Well, that's the way I see it.
And these scientists, you know, right now when they do these kind of experiments looking for gravity wells and that sort of thing, they have to do it kind of remotely.
They sit down here on the surface of the Earth and they launch these Hello there.
You're on the air with Gene Myers.
Where are you calling from, please?
Okay.
With these stations, the scientists can actually be in orbit and do some of the experiments
themselves and have a much tighter control of whatever probes they did send out beyond
the moon, towards the sun, or towards Mars.
Here, here.
Hello there, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Where are you calling from, please?
Oklahoma City.
Okay.
Well, my second question was going to be, if those space stations work, what if they
They wanted to start building some more around the other planets.
Do you think that would be possible?
Yeah, in fact the ones that you built around the Earth could actually be flown to the other planets.
I don't know why anybody would want to go to Venus, but you could actually fly one of these into orbit around Venus and of course the Moon and out to Mars.
I'm not sure how much further You'd want to go to Mars because of the asteroid problem and, you know, the diminishing sunlight.
But certainly in this range between Mars and Earth and Venus, it'd be an ideal vehicle for, you know, for moving scientists around and, uh... Obviously, most of the power would be solar.
Yeah, yeah.
Once you got out past Mars, you'd have to start using some of the, uh, nuclear generators that, uh, like the ones on Cassini, you know, that people are complaining about.
Yes, I... It'd work.
It'd work, but it'd be kind of a...
Cold flight out there.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Where are you, please?
In Portland.
Yes, sir.
I was wondering how much money they've already spent on this particular project?
Or is this just existing technology that he's talking about using?
You know, this is pretty much existing technology.
NASA has, you know, they spent something like $20 billion developing the space shuttles up to this point.
That's not including all the launches.
And stuff they've done after they built the first few of them.
So basically you've just kind of made an architectural rendering of what this would look like?
Oh, I see what you mean.
Yeah, from my point of view, right.
All the engineering has been done, as I mentioned, by these NASA and aerospace engineers on their own time.
We've put together some renderings and that's one of the reasons we're looking for this initial sponsorship here from the cruise ship companies or the casinos.
I think the cruise ship company's sponsorship would be the most dramatic As far as the news media goes, and it would make more sense to the general public once they saw the connection between these two.
Or a consortium.
Or a consortium, but that's what some of the initial funding would be used for, to get some very detailed engineering studies done of this and some stunning Hollywood-level graphics of what the exteriors and the interiors of these stations would look like for the tourists.
Maybe somebody who's listening, Gene, in Hollywood Would make a movie about this, a technically accurate movie about this.
That would be another way to get it going.
Yeah, that way.
There's a group out here in Downey, California that's trying to get the old Rockwell site, a couple of hundred acres, converted over to a historical site because that's where the shuttles were designed and a lot of the Apollo program was designed.
And we've suggested that Universal Studios might want to come in there and turn the thing
into kind of a space theme park.
There you go.
With a grounded version of this space station that people could walk through.
The thing would cover a couple of acres on the ground.
But it could be a full-size mock-up of what the real station in orbit would be like.
And it'd be a real drantic.
It could double as a movie set for movies that could eventually be filmed aboard the
stations in orbit.
Well, movies have a lot of power, Gene, and they love doing things, I mean, look at the science fiction genre that's out there right now.
Oh, sure, it's enormous, and it's going to get more, it's going to get, I think, more powerful as the millennium approaches.
So do I. First time caller on line, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Good morning.
Hello?
Hello!
Yeah, I'm calling from Las Vegas, and I've been listening since the beginning of the program.
It's very interesting and exciting.
Yes.
And in between, I called the 1-800 number for information.
555-1212.
Information about what?
For that Carnival Cruise.
Oh.
For my own information, because you seem hesitant to give their phone number over the air.
Yeah, I really don't want to do that, because... But everybody could call and get it themselves.
I got one for Anybody can do it, but I'd rather not give it out.
No, I'm not.
But you're talking about the biological effects?
Yes.
And it seems like you were thinking vertically.
And I was wondering if maybe on men, the circulation going upward might help baldness even.
Because it seems like they don't have circulation on top and that's why they go bald.
There's some real striking physical benefits that it would come from long-term stays in orbit.
I know that John Glenn, who's now 75 years old, is trying very hard to get NASA to send him up to study the effects of zero-G on aging.
He believes that by sending the elderly up there, that long stays in gravity will actually stop or possibly reverse.
Some of the aging process.
Yeah, I thought maybe people might eventually want to go there just for the rejuvenating benefits.
Yeah, that's a real possibility.
Some of the surgeons that I've spoken with at Harvard believe that that could be a real possibility.
Plus, I know you were running a commercial a little while ago for weight loss products.
If a station is spinning at one RPM, everybody automatically weighs half as much.
So I imagine there wouldn't even be a market for that sort of thing.
I think it would help eliminate arthritis, because the gravity is pulling down on you and hurting your joints.
No question about it.
Back problems, you know, there's a whole slew of medical things that, particularly the heart, because in Zero-G, they found that the hearts of the astronauts that stayed on Skylab actually shrank by 10% because they had such little work to do.
Really?
Really.
So, you know, people with heart problems, Would certainly enjoy a stay up there, but also quite a bit of heart surgery could be done in orbit.
And you know, you'd have this period of low gravity where the heart could heal much faster than anything that would happen down here.
In fact, David Adair pointed out that some of the astronauts on Skylab that had some serious scrapes on their arms were stunned to see that the skin heal in three or four days.
instead of the three or four weeks that it would take down here and no scar tissue form.
So there are some real stunning things besides just the tourism aspects that are possible
up there.
East of the Rockies, you are on the air with Gene Myers.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Where are you sir?
Tampa, Florida.
Okay.
My concern is the communications that are going to occur from there.
If you are going to have these wealthy individuals, these Bill Gates, these Warren Buffets, these
Ken Roberts, that's who you are, if you are going to have them there for two weeks or
thirty days, they are obviously going to want to communicate with their businesses back
on the planet.
Sure.
How are they going to do that?
Oh, no problem.
I can answer that one.
My gosh.
The station would simply communicate through the vast array of orbiting communication satellites we now have.
There would be absolutely no disruption whatsoever.
Correct, Gene?
Right.
They would not be isolated at all.
In fact, one of the commercial uses, as I mentioned, for the stations would be actually repairing some of these There's communication satellites that are up in orbit now, but they'd be right in the middle of a network of communications around the entire planet.
As a matter of fact, actually, I envision a telephone, if not a video phone, in every cabin.
Right.
No, that's not a biggie at all.
No, they all go through a sort of central operator at the center of the station.
Exactly.
Yeah, east of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Hi.
Hello?
Hello?
Yes, you're on the air.
Turn your radio off and go ahead.
Yeah, I was trying to reach for it at the same time you came on.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, my name is Diane and I'm calling from Vandenberg, a matter of fact.
Very familiar with working in the missile business.
And I'm like, Art, where do I sign up and how soon?
Boy, what a fantastic idea.
I mean, it's just, it's not an idea.
I mean, it's a reality.
Yeah, it really is and it's going to take just regular folks like you and me and Art and the rest of making a few calls to the TV stations or the newspapers telling them about the idea and saying that you think it would make a terrific story and getting the thing rolling that way.
Well, I've worked in advertising.
PR is my middle name.
You've got my number.
Give me a call.
I'm going to do that because I would love to get involved and I would love to help do anything I possibly can because it makes perfect sense to me.
Oh, that's wonderful.
It makes perfect sense.
This is not something that I could come close to accomplishing on my own.
I put together the financial potential of it and I recognize the marketing thing.
And I'm reasonably good at talking on the radio and doing interviews, but it's really going to take people like you and the listeners here, you know, picking up the phone and making a couple of calls and getting the ball rolling that way, because it's the public excitement that's going to trigger the financing, which is the critical element from these marketing departments of the big companies.
Well, that's how things get done.
I mean, supply and demand, folks.
Supply and demand.
And if there is demand, believe me, there will be supply.
First time caller line, good morning to you.
You're on the air with Gene Myers and Art Bell.
Thanks for coming on Mr. Myers and hi Art, this is Charles in Albuquerque.
Hi there.
I was wondering about liability insurance for the passengers and flight insurance.
Probably just like with airliners, maybe a bit more once they calculated the risk.
What do you say Gene?
Yeah, I think it would be right in that ballpark.
It would be higher than Then the airlines, just for the reason I mentioned, they don't have a long history of shuttle launches.
But if the insurance industry was brought into the design of these second generation shuttles, they could, with maybe 5% modification of the design, they could feel comfortable cutting the insurance rates, perhaps in half of what the current shuttles have to pay.
Another thing is that the aerospace companies that are developing this X-33, this other commercial space plane that's supposed to be ready in five or six years.
They're asking Congress for special liability insurance to cover these type of manned space launches.
Right now the government covers the insurance for the space shuttles themselves, but once you turn the shuttles over to private operators, insurance liability is one of the big issues.
So they're asking the government to come in and sort of put a cap on individual liability.
You know, maybe a million dollars a passenger or something so that the operators of these
commercial shuttles and stations would be able to arrange the financing.
Makes sense to me.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers.
Good morning.
Oh, good evening.
Art, great show as always.
Thank you.
Mr. Myers.
Hi, my name is Mike.
I'm in Fresno, California.
I want to know if you had heard or you're familiar with any of Timothy Leary's plans
and ideas for these little colonies.
UGH!
Tim Leary, of course, is presently in orbit.
Yes, I know, but I saw one of his seminars at a college in Los Angeles in 1979, and he had presented exactly these ideas.
He had, you know, the video presentations.
I just don't think that he had put together the practical aspects of it that Gene has and others have that make it financially feasible, financially possible, and financially profitable.
Larry and Jerry O'Neill and some of the other guys that have talked about large-scale space colonies in the past Somehow I always assumed that the government would pay for it.
They didn't know how to approach corporations for corporate sponsorship like the Olympics.
To me it was a missing link in this idea.
The engineering has been worked out in detail for quite some time, but nobody figured out how to get the corporations excited about it.
You know, audiences like yours are the ones that could actually make that happen.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers and Art Bell.
Hi.
Hi, Eric.
I just called up to see if I could be on the last call for any show.
Sorry.
Okay.
Well, you weren't.
You missed it.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gene Myers and Art Bell.
Hi.
Hi.
Where are you?
I'm in British Columbia.
Okay.
I can barely hear you.
Is it any better?
Oh, it's much better, yes.
Thank you.
I was on my speakerphone.
So you're in British Columbia?
Yes.
All right.
Go ahead.
And my question is, he said this thing will be the brightest thing in the stars, especially if it's a new moon, and known that many insects and kind of nocturnal birds navigate by the stars and the moon.
Is it possible this could have a detrimental environmental impact All right.
There's a reasonable question.
How about an EPA impact study?
Well, I don't think you'd have the problems from reflected starlight.
They would be brighter than Venus.
They certainly would not be as bright as the moon.
And you'd have to get a very large number of them up there before you have any actual problem.
But one of the proposals, one of the uses for these things would That's been suggested is that the workers aboard a station like this could build these very large reflectors that would be put up in orbit several miles across.
And those could intentionally be aimed down on commercial forests in the nighttime, for instance, to allow the trees to mature four to five times faster than they normally do.
Wow!
And also to control insect pests.
If you are showing them down on farms in Kansas 24 hours a day, the crops would mature in
three to four weeks and the insects would not be able to keep up because their cycles
would be out of sync with the 24 hours of sunlight.
Gene, we are out of time.
You've done the entire program.
Your ideas are so incredible, so fantastic, so possible, so practical that any newspaper
guy listening, any person in Hollywood, any magazine or TV show that doesn't want to talk
to you has absolutely got to be out of their minds.
There's every aspect of this story one can imagine, from the technical part, to the spiritual part, to the sexual part, to the profitable part, to the... I mean, it's got to be one of the most interesting stories I've ever had the pleasure of presenting on the air.
And so I want to thank you, and I'm going to give that number out one more time.
Gene, thank you.
Okay.
Take care.
All right, you too.
Talk to you later.
Right.
We'll do it again.
That's Gene Myers.
And so if you're in the media and you want a piece of this, you're going to want to call Gene tomorrow at area code 626, and the number is 338 3, 6, 5, 6.
Let me give that to you again.
Because the way to turn this into reality, to turn it from talk to reality, ideas have power, real power, is to simply get the word out to the people.
So, by all means, if you're in a position to do that, and you want to increase your circulation, or you want higher ratings for your TV show, I mean, I'm just laying it out here, folks, You're going to want to definitely talk to Gene Myers at area code 626-338-3656.
And so, that's it.
Tomorrow night, Whitley Strieber.
I'm Mark Bell, from the high desert.
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