Dr. David Livingston and Richard C. Hoagland expose NASA’s suppression of space tourism, despite 75–80% public approval—like Dennis Tito’s $20M ISS trip in 2001—and a 1998 internal report proving its feasibility. Livingston’s rejected dissertation on commercial space hotels, using modified 747 fuselages or Spacehab inflatables, highlights NASA’s $10K-per-pound launch costs and Wall Street’s ignorance of orbital economics. Hoagland links delays to dark military projects, citing whistleblowers and suppressed shuttle footage (e.g., STS-48), while Livingston blames NASA’s control over reusable tech like external fuel tanks. The "overview effect" could disrupt power structures, but NASA resists progress, leaving viable ventures—like lunar mining or orbital refueling—stifled by lack of government support. Public pressure may force change, revealing hidden agendas behind space’s commercial and extraterrestrial potential. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I did your good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours, Friday night, Saturday morning, in the food of the week, everybody.
Wherever you may be across this great land of ours, from the island of Guam, Zirock, out there in the Pacific, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet and coast to coast, coast, coast to coast.
And tonight, welcome to KRKY in Dillon, Colorado.
9.30 on the dial in Dillon, Colorado.
That's KRKY, Dillon, Colorado.
Welcome to the network as we continue to rocket toward 500 affiliates.
And don't forget, we prefeed now every night three hours of the program.
That's good information for listeners and radio stations out there.
Three hours prior to each program, we prefeed three hours of the previous night's program so that those radio stations wishing to treat their listeners to the previous night's programs and some good ratings from their point of view, I suppose, why you can pick it up and one sort of flows into the other.
So what's going on tonight?
Well, as you know, the FBI misplaced, lost, or didn't turn over to defense attorneys thousands of documents.
Not a few, not a folder, but thousands of documents.
And as a result, some interesting things are happening with McVeigh.
The execution was rescheduled.
They've put it off now.
The Attorney General said because of this, they're going to put it off.
And McVeigh, in the meantime, is said to be possibly reconsidering his earlier decision against challenging the execution order.
Now, I suppose if they challenge it, it could go on for, what, a decade?
Some victims said they were sickened.
Others resigned after the dramatic turn of events in what was to be the first federal execution since 1963.
The part I don't get is if they're going to put it off, I don't get it.
McVeigh said, do me, kill me.
I'm out of here.
Don't want to be in prison for life.
So if they've rescheduled for June 11th, it's not that far away, right?
In order to go over this new material, McVay, angry, says, well, then maybe I won't let you kill me at all.
I don't quite comprehend that.
Life is life is life, right?
So I guess he's angry that he's not being dispatched on time or changing his mind, who knows.
A Las Vegas, an 11-year-old girl saw her parents for the first time Friday since she was allegedly kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a former Baptist school principal.
A family court judge released the girl to the custody of Indiana Child Protective Services and ordered supervised visits with her parents.
An Indiana court has scheduled a hearing Wednesday on custody.
The suspect remains in Nevada to face charges in the alleged May 1st abduction that crisscrossed 12 states.
If you're watching the Blake case, Robert Blake's bodyguard said Friday that the police wrongly believe the actor killed his wife and dismissed his own theories on her slaying.
Earl Caldwell said he believes a killer gunning for Blake shot the actor's wife, Bonnie Lee Blakely, by mistake.
Blakely was shot in Blake's car on May 4th at a restaurant where the couple had dined.
Police will only say that Blake, the 67-year-old star of 1970s television series Beretta, has not been ruled out as a suspect.
All right.
I'm going to read you at least some of how the Washington Post covered the Dr. Greer affair in Washington.
A group of people, this is Washington Post, a group of people who believe in UFOs held a news conference yesterday, now the day before, that established beyond the shadow of a doubt that reached levels of credibility so high as to constitute actual proof that there really do exist people who believe in UFOs.
So you know right where, you know exactly where this story is going to go, right?
All they say that was done is prove that there is actually a group of people who do believe in UFOs.
They go on, this was the big day for the disclosure project, an attempt to incite the government to admit that unidentified flying objects are piloted by creatures from another world.
The organizer, Dr. Stephen Greer, I added the doctor, they didn't even put that in there.
Well, they do say a Charlottesville emergency room physician, announced that this was a moment of historic, indeed planetary significance.
This is the end of the childhood of the human race, he said.
It's time for us to become mature adults along with cosmic civilizations that are out there.
He arranged an impressive venue, the main ballroom of the National Press Club.
Upward of a hundred people were there, along with more than a dozen TV cameras.
At a long table up front sat 20 witnesses, most of them gray-haired men who'd served in the military.
As they took turns at the microphone, it became quickly apparent that this was rather an odd-fashioned event.
A return to the fundamentals of ufology, the discussion of aerial anomalies.
At one point, a witness flashed two black and white photos of a saucer-shaped craft.
The tales were set, for the most part, in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
No talk of alien abductions or alien human hybridization programs or implementation of alien fetuses or any of those extremely intimate close encounters that have dominated ufology in recent years.
Actually, they say UFO mythology.
These guys were from the hardware wing of the movement.
They'd seen things in the skies they couldn't explain, and that suggested to their minds extraterrestrial visitors.
They'd seen objects, lights, radar blips, moving at extraordinary speed.
What they didn't see in almost every case were any actual aliens.
Only one witness, Clifford Stone, a retired Army sergeant, told of having directly seen aliens.
He'd seen them both dead and alive at the scenes of crashed saucers.
Asked if he could describe their appearance, he said I could, but it would probably take a whole lot of time.
He did stipulate that there are 57 alien species, including three types of grays.
Many aliens are humanoid and indeed are indistinguishable from members of our own species.
Some can touch an object in a dark room and tell its color.
There were a few other unverified bombshells.
One speaker claimed that George Bush, the elder and director of the CIA, refused to give newly inaugurated President Carter top-secret files on UFOs.
Greer, meanwhile, assured the audience the military has already developed spacecraft that can travel faster than the speed of light.
The disclosure project is part of a long and so far unsuccessful effort to incite congressional hearings on the UFO issue.
Greer says he's conducted interviews with 400 people with intimate knowledge of the alien phenomena and government cover-up.
Many, he claimed, are afraid to come forward without some sort of congressional immunity.
We know, said Greer, lethal force has been used to keep this secret.
But there was nothing presented at the news conference that could be considered forensic evidence.
Indeed, the audience heard what is known as the argument from authority.
Evidence on the table was essentially in the form of resumes.
The witnesses vouched for their credibility and said they'd like to tell their stories to Congress.
Maybe that's not as impressive as someone coming forward with an actual alien tentacle, but you've got to start somewhere.
If nothing else, this was an interesting glimpse of the corrosive side effects of government secrecy.
The witnesses have been burdened by suspicion for decades.
Some said they were told by superiors to stay silent about what they'd seen.
Such things do exist.
Please believe me, said retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles L. Brown, who once analyzed UFO sightings and saw just two years ago two inexplicable objects.
And on it goes.
They say toward the end of the story, when the news conference was over, rational observers were faced with two scenarios.
Intelligent creatures have piloted spaceships across trillions of miles to visit our planet.
They have the ability to elude detection by scientific investigators and mainstream news organizations.
Also seen by thousands of people, secret forces within our government have masterfully covered up the alien presence for a half century, although sometimes the cover-up is imperfect, which is why at Seifoy you can buy Chef Boy RD flying saucers and aliens canned pasta.
People like Stephen Greer, the crusading emergency room physician, have seen through the lies and are going to help us enter the era of cosmic brotherhood.
Or some people believe in things that aren't true.
Your call.
Pretty snide, pretty degrading, divisive.
Lots of ridicule in that.
And, you know, that's pretty sad.
Not all news organizations reported as the Washington Post did, but that's how they did it.
And I thought you ought to at least get the tone of the thing so you'd know.
You're going to love this one.
From Italy.
Remember I told you last night, well, it was during the latter part of the show, so you might not have heard it.
I said I had heard that there were scientists who were reviving alien bacteria.
And this sounds like something else that the Washington Post could make fun of, except it's, of course, true.
I've got the news story right here.
Bruno Diorngio, a geologist working for the Italian National Research Council, and Giuseppe Garacci, professor of molecular biology at Naples University, apologize for slaughtering names, identified and brought back to life extraterrestrial microorganisms lodged inside a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite kept at Naples Mineralogical Museum.
When in contact with a physiological solution, they became visible and began to move.
They said while presenting the finding at the Italian Space Agency yesterday, the bacteria called CRIME, that's C-R-Y-M-S, For crystal microbes by the researchers, remained dormant for billions of years, survived extreme ambient conditions, a clear indication, according to the researchers, that light can indeed exist everywhere in the solar system, though in a quiescent state.
Once brought back to life, the crimes were cloned by the researchers and their DNA was analyzed.
Their genetic code is like any known on Earth.
That's a quote from the scientific director of the Italian space station.
So let's think about this now.
We're bringing back to life bacteria that are billions of years old from another world and another time and they're coming back alive.
and not only are they alive but we are now analyzing their d_n_a_ so they might be cloned you ever wonder about the i would Black goo, black fungus, whatever it is, closing schools and homes.
We've got a mystery disease killing thoroughbred foals in Kentucky, sweeping Kentucky's bluegrass country of all places, killing hundreds of foals and causing huge financial losses in the world capital of racehorse breeding.
And I'm afraid that it's actually getting a little worse now.
As a matter of fact, here's an interesting email from somebody in the area.
Hi, Art.
Just wanted to share with you some more information about the deaths of the foals in Kentucky and also in other places.
I am the owner of a small-time breeder, both quarter horses and thoroughbred horses, and I've been following it very closely on the web.
Devastating for all those farms.
I know for a fact some of the foals go for, when they drop, about $88,000.
Now they're saying this mystery disease is causing problems in young horses that they are growing, rather not growing.
They're having problems in the eyes with fluid around the heart, like the general unhealth of the horses.
I also have friends in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and they're all watching their foals and mares with an eagle eye.
All of them are looking good so far, but of course, there's not been a whole lot of grass due to drought conditions.
They say it has something they think to do with the grass and the warm temperatures.
I'm very worried about my last two mares had last month.
It's called my toxin, myotoxin, M-Y-O-T-O-X-I-N.
I'm very worried about my last two mares that are due to foal.
I know that I will have my vet aware of when they are close.
I know two barns down the road from me lost two of their foal, and those mares had been up in Kentucky until just three months ago.
By the way, patients, this is Toronto now, patients at several Western Ontario hospitals, not just one.
You remember hearing about one with something like MadCow?
Well, it may not be just one, according to Ontario's Health Minister.
Apparently, the one that you recall is only one of four facilities where patients may have been exposed, they say, to the disease which attacks the brain like Mad Cow disease.
Because it seems that medical instruments are shared, that we now find out, between not just the hospital that had that patient, but three other hospitals as well.
So they're going to hold a news conference to talk to some people like me that are afraid of this sort of thing and try and ease their minds in some way, I guess.
unidentified
but they are concerned that it may have spread Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 11th, 2001.
Music by Ben Thede Well, I see I've eaten up most of my first little segment here, haven't I?
From Rio de Janeiro, bullfrog skin, if the bullfrogs stay on Earth, is effective, they now say, get this, in treating severe burns, according to a study be presented later this month at a South American Conference of Plastic Surgeons.
That's right.
Raw, regular old bullfrog skins, it turns out, will really help a burn as nearly nothing else.
Using the skin of the Rana, well, I won't try to pronounce it, commonly known anyway as the American bullfrog to cover severe burns is a technique developed by plastic surgeon Nelson Piccolo and used to great success at a hospital for the last six years there, helping to treat some of the 50,000 Brazilians admitted to the hospital every year for severe burns.
Scar tissue normally forms over severe burns in some 20 to 30 days after an injury.
But if you're using a bullfrog skin as a temporary cover, instead of 20 to 30 days, you get it in six days.
And I remember when we were worried about frogs out there.
Remember that?
And a whole lot of people called up and said, well, who the hell cares if we lose the frogs?
Music By the way, with reference to the black mold that we've been talking about, just found out about, that people say is old, but really, to me, it's new.
I haven't heard about that, have you?
There is now circulating among realtors something you've got to sign if you're selling your house.
Starts out there has been a great deal of publicity regarding the existence of toxic and non-toxic mold in homes, apartments, and commercial buildings.
Current information indicates that some types of mold may cause severe health problems for certain individuals.
Not all molds are detectable by a visual inspection by a realtor or even a professional wholesale house inspector.
It is also possible that the property could have a hidden mold problem that the seller is not aware of.
The only way to provide any reasonable assurance that the property does not have mold or other health hazard problems is to retain the services of an environmental expert who will conduct specific tests.
Normally, these tests will consist of an interior and exterior examination for airborne spores and a carpet test.
But other procedures may be necessary.
Any visible mold should be professionally evaluated.
And then down at the bottom, there's a place where the buyer has to sign, and you've got to get this guy to come in.
And I'm telling you, it's getting stranger and stranger out there.
Yes, I'm calling from San Diego, and I wanted to touch on three things.
First, the Timothy McVeigh thing.
Yes.
I was brainstorming about that, and what I think is going on is something that the FBI and the government have known of things that are going on about plots to do things about the date of his execution.
And then on other subject, let's see, the Stephen Greer thing, I've met him before, and at his conference there, I've also met Clifford Stone, and I think he is really on to something, but he's off track on some things.
And as is with usual things of this matter, they will mislead people.
and he admitted that he's not sure about everything.
At Steven Greer's conference someone asked him- And that's what I'm saying.
And at Stephen Greer's conference, someone asked him about Hoagland's research.
And Stephen Greer came right out and said, yes, we have evidence there are artificial artifacts on Mars.
But anyway, when Hoagland is on later tonight, what I think about him is even every day when I first start, I see the Old Navy store, and he did that story.
And I really think...
Yes, and I really think that he is stretching it to the limit to try to get every information he can.
Please don't read, but tell me about it if you want to.
unidentified
Okay, what it is, is it has to do with animals and their being cared for and respected and highly prized, highly valued at the infinite light, and that abuse towards animals is considered a greater offense to the infinite light because at the hands of humans, animals can't protect themselves.
You know, in this country, no matter where you are, we're on so many big 50,000-watt stations that if you have even a half-decent antenna, you'll hear us on plenty of stations.
I mean, they've got some channels of 60s, 70s, 80s rock.
But I mean, they've got about 100 channels devoted to music.
That's true of Dish and Direct.
And they don't, for some reason, put talk up there.
And that absolutely blows my mind.
I'm kind of glad he mentioned it.
The talk format right now is the number one format in America.
So you would think if you had 100 channels that you could devote at least just one of them to the most popular format in America.
Wouldn't you think that?
Now I understand that there are commercials and that they run stuff that doesn't have commercials, but you tell me, as a DISH subscriber or a direct subscriber, commercials or not, wouldn't you like to have the ability to receive the show in a venue of that sort?
So I'm not sure what they're doing, why they're doing it, what's going on, but so it is.
I agree with you that the whole Chemtrail thing is terrible.
But you're making a jump without scientific basis.
We don't know it's not, and I'll allow it as a possibility, but we don't know that it's doing it.
I have rather another theory, frankly, about this emerging disease thing.
A mad cow, all the problems in Europe, the slaughter of 2 million animals, and now all of a sudden these mysterious things popping up here.
I think that it has to do with a change in our climate, more likely.
It has to do with the contaminants that we're putting into the air ourselves, more likely.
I don't rule out the white plains and what are said to be chemtrails.
I don't rule them out.
But I really think that a larger environmental picture is what is at work here.
And that we better begin to change it pretty soon or it will change us.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Hey, I don't know if you heard about the I was watching this one TV show and they had frozen methane gas in the ocean bottom and you could use that as a fuel.
But also, I wanted to say about the whole Timothy McVeigh thing.
I just recently read a book by Danny Coulson, who you may remember is the FBI hostage rescue team founder or first commander of it.
He wrote his memoirs, and he explains very thoroughly and gives all the evidence of how they caught Timothy McVay and how the possible John Doe II came about.
And what happened was that the mechanic at the Ryder Rental place did see somebody like that, but it was the day before.
The person who read in the truck the day before Timothy McVeigh, who also looked like him, he had somebody with him.
And Timothy McVeigh did not.
And the owner of the shop thought that Timothy McVeigh had this guy with him when he confused him with the other guy.
Well, I don't know about like they were looking for something.
That's supposition.
but yes they've been seen a tree top level and flying very low all over the world actually yeah that was and it kind of put Well, you would think, as good as we are at locating downed airplanes with transponders and emergency this and that, that if aliens had a downed craft, they wouldn't have to do a conventional grid-type search, you know.
They would more or less know exactly where it is.
I am still saddened by some of the press, the Washington Post in particular, and the way it's been reporting on what Dr. Greer is doing back there.
An awful lot of ridicule in that article, and I thought foolishly, naively, that we had gotten past that point.
And that if you put a bunch of serious military fellows who had some serious things to say, evidence in front of you, you would consider it without the rights of comment.
Foolish me.
We're going to talk about tourism in space.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues.
With Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up My heart is on fire.
so Hey, hey, hey, hey, yo.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Premier Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 11th, 2001.
Music Dr. David Livingston is a business consultant, financial advisor, strategic planner.
For more than 25 years, has worked in oil and gas exploration, real estate development, Sales, finance, marketing, direct advertising, and sales.
He currently specializes in solving business problems for entrepreneurial operations startups, businesses with 10 or fewer employees, in addition to his writing, lecturing, and consulting on commercial space matters.
Dr. Livingston has also served as an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Business at Golden State University, teaching entrepreneurship and small business management.
He earned his BA from the University of Arizona, an MBA in International Business Management from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and his doctorate in business administration at Golden Gate.
His doctoral dissertation was titled, Outer Space Commerce, Its History and Prospects.
Livingston has spoken or had his papers presented at various international space conferences, including Space 98 and Space 2000 Mars Society Conferences, the Lunar Development Conference, the IAA, and the Cato Institute.
Pretty prestigious stuff.
His lecture topics, including venture capital financing for new space businesses, RLVs, and space tourism, barriers to space enterprise.
I wonder what that might be.
As well as the exporting of business ethics from Earth to commercial space.
Well, it started out to be space tourism, but my advisors insisted that it be broadened because five and a half years ago when this started, space tourism was a joke to everybody, to even the people who had heard of it.
I just don't think that they're ready to give up the control to space which they have enjoyed for so many years since 1959.
But actually, if I briefly tell you the story of my dissertation, it tells you what's really happened to space tourism and, for that matter, to commercial space over the last five years.
And it's an interesting story, and it involves Richard Hoagland.
About five and a half years ago, I received a call from my close friend, Laura, who's listening to this show.
Hi, Laura.
And she said, there's a guy on the radio on a talk show in San Francisco talking about the face on Mars and aliens and all sorts of stuff that you would probably love.
You've got to turn on and hear this guy.
So up to now, I had never heard of these subjects.
And they had been sort of in the closet with me all my life.
I'd had a telescope.
I was always looking at the stars and taking pictures as a kid, a subscriber to Sky and Telescope.
But it never was mentioned to anybody.
It was just one of those things that you don't talk about.
And I turn on the radio and I hear the last 20 or 30 minutes of Richard's interview.
And I immediately ordered all of his tapes and his book monuments.
And it came in the mail one day, and my kids were home from school that day, and we immediately started looking at the videos, and we were stunned.
And I was stunned on many accounts.
One, that this material even existed, and two, that someone could actually talk about this in public.
Because my world, my business world, my cultural world had been very straight.
It was a world of whatever NASA said about space was absolutely right.
It was the Bible.
Whatever the United States was doing in space with NASA, it was right.
The Russians were our enemy.
We always had to do something better than the Russians.
So right after we got through watching the videos, the mail came, and in the mail was a letter from Golden Gate that said, guess what, David?
You have three months to produce a dissertation proposal or you're out of the doctoral program.
So I had completed my doctoral studies classes a long time before, but I had lost interest in the program.
I had a son that was born with cystic fibrosis, and there were just a lot of other matters on my mind, and writing a dissertation about returns on investment and whatever it might be just was of no interest to me.
I called Richard first because I got the idea that here was a guy that really sparked something about my passion.
And intuitively, I was starting to wake up to something that just really drove me and that I could identify with all my life.
It was like I was coming out of the closet to be able to speak freely about space, to be able to speak freely about my knowing but not being able to prove that space was absolutely full of life, that the universe was teeming with life, that humans belonged in space, and it was time we get our butts off this planet and we go places.
And Richard had somehow sparked that in me when I saw his tapes on Sidonia and I read Monuments, which, by the way, for me, without a good background in math, was quite a challenge to get through.
And my kids were pretty young at the time, and we were all just amazed at that material.
So I tracked Richard down in New Jersey, which is where he was at the time, and I said, Richard, can you help me figure out what I can do for a very conservative business school doctoral dissertation that has to be about making money and business?
It can't just be about science or about fantasy stuff.
And they're not going to go into anything with aliens or anything like that.
It's got to be straight.
And so Richard and I began an exchange That lasted several months, and he opened me up to the possibility of tourists going into space, which I had never heard of or never thought about.
To be fair to Richard, then, even now, Richard has never been into the alien aspect of ufology and not really into ufology.
What he has been into is artifacts on Mars and artifacts on the moon from what he believes to be some very ancient civilization, not necessarily current, but he was never big on UFOs.
In fact, Richard never talked about UFOs.
He talked about stuff that was up there that we ought to go see.
And I was still starting to figure out that there was a whole world out there that was of interest to me, but that I had had no knowledge of.
And there wasn't any differentiation yet with what Richard does and what I thought all of this meant.
So I had to make it clear to Richard that I couldn't go off into any fantasy tangents, but if he could help me figure out something that was a viable business school topic that would be able to be approved by a conservative business school, that would work.
So Richard and I began an exchange, and then Richard came out to the Bay Area for a UFO conference, and my sons and I went down and met him at that conference.
We had never been to a conference like that, and that's an interesting story in itself.
And Richard gave me some ideas and pointed me in the direction of space tourism.
And then, as circumstances have it, well, I was driving home from work one day, and this professor from Stanford, Bruce Lusinian, was on the radio being interviewed by NPR about humans going to Mars.
And I thought, my God, this guy I've got to meet with.
So I tracked him down at Stanford, and I came down and was immediately given a two-hour lecture on space tourism is where the action is.
So I then went to my business school, and I said, look, I've only got 45 days left of this period that you gave me.
I want to do my proposal.
I'm going to need more time.
This is my topic, space tourism.
And boy, was I laughed at.
Really?
It was humiliating.
And I was not taken seriously.
And the one thing I can say is that at the time, and I forget the professor's name who was the head of the business school, was open-minded enough to say, look, just because I think this is foolish and I don't believe in it, I'm not going to stand in your way of doing it.
So I'll extend your proposal time for another 90 days if you can find somebody at this school to be the chair of your committee.
And I'll give you a list of eight or nine or ten of the professors that I think are the most open-minded that you might have some success talking to.
So in a day or two, he faxed me a list and I began calling these professors.
You know, this is not a topic for a business school.
You know, we're not doing science fiction novels here.
It was across the board.
And I got down to two professors on the list.
And one of them had been my economics professor in my MBA program and also in my doctoral studies program.
And I had called him, I had saved him for last because I wanted to sort of get the reaction from the other professors before I called this gentleman.
And his name, Dr. Holman.
And he said, David, I don't know the first thing about space tourism.
I don't even know if it's a possibility.
I don't know anything about it.
But I certainly remember you from my classwork.
And, you know, if you can convince me, I'll do it.
So I came in and I brought in to a meeting a bunch of Richard's work.
And I did my best to convince him that space tourism and commerce in space other than satellites made an enormous sense.
And he said, if you can find some other people to be on your committee, I'll be the chairman for you.
And I don't know anything about space, but I can certainly advise you on business matters, and I can certainly advise you on the standards here at the university.
And he told me to call another professor at Golden Gate, Dr. Prudent, who's a finance and marketing man.
And upon Dr. Homan's recommendation, Dr. Prudent agreed to be on the committee.
And he said, I don't know the first thing about space tourism, but it sounds interesting.
So out of about 12 people altogether, I found two open-minded people willing to be on the committee that confessed they had no knowledge about it, never heard of it, never thought of it, but were willing to give me a chance.
And then Dr. Lucinian from Stanford agreed to help me, and then he introduced me to some people at Boeing who eventually led me to Dr. Willenberg, who certainly was willing to join me.
He's with Boeing Commercial Space Division in Southern California.
And then I began the process of writing a proposal, which took me just about a year to do.
So they kept extending me to do this.
And at Golden Gate, I had to defend the proposal.
I did not have to defend the dissertation when it was completed.
And if the proposal were accepted, then if the dissertation was ultimately accepted by my committee, then I had earned my degree.
So I had to defend the proposal.
There were five or six professors there, including Dr. Homan.
So then what unfolded was the writing of my dissertation.
And it went from being laughed at and scorned at and giggled at five years ago to when I went in and surrendered my 530-page dissertation the first of April of this year.
There were about 12 professors that came to this little mini celebration.
There wasn't one person there that laughed.
They had all heard about the space dissertation and they wanted to meet me.
They couldn't have been more wide-eyed and interested.
They asked me questions about space, about space tourism, space commerce.
One professor even asked in front of all the others, what are all these structures and pictures I understand of strange objects on Mars?
And he asked me if I knew where to find on the internet the pictures of the glass tubes that NASA likes to say are sand in.
So I gave him the links to your page and then he later emailed me back and thanked me and found them most interesting.
And it was a complete turnaround, five years.
And in five years, Dennis Tito has taken civilians into space and shown the world that we can all get up there.
And it's on the front page of every newspaper and in every form of media around the world.
And so that's my story, but it's also the story of space tourism.
I mean, we've all understood that it takes people, at least certainly at the beginning of the space program, who were test pilots and qualified in all kinds of ways to go into space.
However, we saw John Glenn go up, so we know that older fellows can go up.
Now we've seen Tito go up, so we know normal guys can go up, even 60-year-olds, and survive the experience.
Doctor, hold on a moment.
We're going to take a break here at the bottom of the air.
And when we come back, we're really going to talk about what the hell's going on with NASA.
Now, their private domain, I think, is what I just heard.
That would be our financed private domain for them, right?
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All right, since Dr. Livingston did his doctoral dissertation on outer space commerce, its history and prospects, he's obviously probably one of the better people qualified to comment on what's going on right now or what should be going on right now.
And you said NASA's doing this because it's their own, they don't want to give up their own little private domain.
And I would say their own little private domain that we are financing.
And I think there are several dimensions to properly respond to your question.
And the first dimension is what I like to call the superficial level.
And this is probably also equivalent to the mainstream level, what most people see, what most people probably believe, certainly what the mainstream press reports.
And this is reflected in statements by people in Congress because the United States has paid the bulk of the cost of the International Space Station.
And Russia has not been a good financial partner.
They have caused at least two years in delays and $5 billion in cost overruns.
And this was stated recently by Representative Sensenbrenner, who's a Republican from Wisconsin, when he was objecting to Tito going up there, except he equates Tito going up there to abrazingly increasing the safety risk of the entire mission.
And certainly I disagree with that.
But furthermore, in the Senate, the Democratic Senator from Maryland, Barbara McCulski, also stood up during NASA budget hearings on May 9th, which was just two days ago, on NASA's 2002 fiscal budget.
Well, actually, the only thing that I'm aware of that happened is a couple of days before Mr. Tito went up there, something happened to NASA's computer system on the international system.
So the conventional theory is that NASA is playing to Congress on this matter because they are very sensitive about the cost overruns and the delays associated with the International Space Station.
The thing is way over budget.
It's already up to $30 billion and climbing, and the completion date is not until around 2004.
And it is likely that there will be continued cost overruns, and it is likely that Russia will continue to have difficulty paying for their share of the space station.
I have, but I've also heard that they're not going to do Mir 2.
And I've also heard that there are private entities that want to do a truly private and a truly free enterprise space station, which the Russians would be part of.
So I think there's a lot of rhetoric floating around, and right now it's probably too difficult to determine what's real and not real.
Doctor, I've talked to people with plans for hotels in space and things like that, made from the solid rocket boosters, all kinds of interesting plans I've heard about.
People are proceeding with.
What do you think is possible?
What actually is within the realm of possibility?
What could we do if we wanted to, or if they wanted to?
Well, I think it is possible for the private sector to build a space station-like hotel or space station-like business park that would be open to truly free enterprise, free commerce in space, where people would utilize it just like they would use a business park here on Earth or a hotel here on Earth.
If you look at the fuselage of a wide-body jet, it's probably around 60 or 70 percent of the integrity needed to go into low Earth orbit.
So obviously there would have to be changes made and things would have to be done to do that, and you'd have to be able to get it up into orbit and keep it in orbit, and then you would put them together like tinker toys.
You would not necessarily have to spin these.
And one of the assets about being in space is that you're in zero gravity.
So the necessity to take a business park or a space hotel first generation and spin it is not particularly necessary, nor is it really economical.
Spinning it is going to raise your cost and complicate the engineering.
So you could put this thing together with Tinker Toy-like construction and you could modify the fuselage.
And in fact, Professor Lucinian, who was one of my dissertation advisors, has his engineering class on space engineering working on using light-body fuselages right now and building a space station that would probably, a hotel that would probably have a capacity of 60 tourists and a crew of maybe 10 to 20 people.
And they're doing projects like that, not just at Stanford, but at other places.
Well, most of the people that I know in the space tourism community that are really out on the forefront pushing this use the model of cruise liners as the way this will happen.
And they do not believe that it will actually come to be through the space community.
It will come to be through the tourism community.
And the cruise liners are the model for it because they take a certain amount of supplies with them, a certain amount of crew, a certain amount of passengers, and they're captive in an environment which is very similar to what's going to happen on the Space Hotel.
And they provide activities and recreation, and sometimes they provide side trips, and sometimes they're in really weird places or adventure-like places, like going down to Antarctica, like on a LINBAT Explorer or something of that nature.
And so the cruise ship model seems to be the kind of approach that makes the most sense for first-generation space.
Now, the big issue, of course, is that we need a cost-effective certified passenger carrying vehicle to get people up to whatever the hotel is going to be.
This is the biggest barrier right now to commercializing space, to getting space tourism going.
And this is also an area where NASA throws up barriers.
And in fact, when I delivered my talk at Cato recently on barriers to space enterprise, the classification of the barriers that NASA throws up that I'm talking about right now, I named at that convention Livingston's Most Insidious Barriers to Space Enterprise.
So for one thing, NASA would make a comment, Golden would make a speech about financing reusable launch vehicles and new space vehicle technology.
And he would base it on the problems that Lockheed was having with the X-33 and the Venture Star.
So this was a vehicle that probably was destined never to fly to begin with.
And they got almost a billion dollars put into it.
They could never make anything work.
Lockheed's chairman in 1999, Peter Teach, made statements that Lockheed was through putting their own money into the project.
If NASA wanted it, they were going to have to put their money into it.
And Golden made statements, and if you want, I can find a quote and read it to you.
But essentially, he said, Wall Street won't finance these vehicles.
They won't finance new technology.
They won't do any of this stuff.
Wall Street only wants to make money, and we're not there yet.
And this was really applicable to X-33 and VentureStar.
But what it did is that absolutely killed the financial hope for the entrepreneurial reusable launch vehicle companies.
Gary Hudson, who at the time had ROTAN, and this was a reusable launch vehicle that actually flew in demonstration flights and got off the ground, could not raise money.
And part of the reason he could not raise money was the kinds of statements that NASA, Mr. Goldman, put out.
And what happens is Wall Street and the banking Community and all of this, they look to NASA as the Bible, just as I used to do.
They look to the aerospace industry as absolutely the Bible and God.
And if NASA can't do it, and if Lockheed can't do it, how in the hell does a little entrepreneurial company think that they can do it?
So when Mr. Golden or when chairman of Lockheed Peter Peets makes a statement that says that you can't finance these vehicles and you can't make them work, these people don't know that they're talking about an X33 or a VentureStar.
They don't know that it's particular to that engineering design.
They think it means everything.
And the guy that has the entrepreneurial design or the better way of building the mousetrap, he's included in that process and he's dead.
He's dead in the water because Golden said so.
And so this is why it's insidious.
They're telling people that this can't be done, but the real truth is they're only talking about their particular model.
So people who know about X33 or VentureStar know what they're talking about.
Wall Street doesn't.
For my dissertation, I did three different surveys of the entire venture capital industry of the United States to test their attitudes and understanding of space commerce.
And it's dismal.
I mean, they don't even know the difference between the various types of a commercial space project, from launching a satellite to putting a hotel in space.
And not only that, these attitudes have not changed over 13 or 14 years because I found earlier surveys that were somewhat similar, so I could track it back.
And when you have Lockheed and you have Dan Golden making these statements, it perpetuates this myth.
It's like another problem that we run into is NASA loses these orbiters going to Mars.
And they lost two of them.
Remember last time?
Oh, of course, yes, of course.
And there was also a period when Titans were blowing up on the launch pad, launching American military satellites.
And so Wall Street looks at this and they said, my God, you can't even launch a rocket without having it blow up.
My God, we don't want to finance this.
This is too risky.
NASA can't even get a satellite or get something to Mars.
What makes you think you, as an independent company, can do this?
Well, the answer, I believe, is that, well, first of all, Wall Street needs to be brought along in education to show that there's a difference in a project that NASA does going into deep space or outside of low Earth orbit than a low Earth orbit commercial space mission, which is a totally different venture and a totally different set of business risks.
And when we're talking about space tourism and space commerce, we're talking about low Earth orbit out to the moon.
We could do this with off-the-shelf technology.
The risks are entirely different than going to Mars.
The economic value of the mission is entirely different than going to Mars.
Well, it would be, but we don't send too many commercial payloads up on a Titan.
The best missile to use for most of the commercial payloads is a Russian Proton, which has a very, very good success rate, although there are barriers because of legislation in the United States to use the Russian missiles, especially after all the China problems and the bill that was passed in 1998.
But also the largest and most popular selling commercial rocket in the world is Ariane, which is from the French.
And they don't have these failure rates, and they don't have these problems.
And all you have to do is look at the insurance premium for launching on a Proton or launching on a Russian Zenith or launching on an Ariane.
And the Long March has become a fairly accurate and a much more reliable rocket, and it's a very cost-effective launcher.
So when Wall Street has to learn to differentiate the risk here, and it's really up to the people in the commercial space field, the space tourism field, the advocate to help bring people along to be able to make these distinctions.
And this is why I call these barriers insidious, because when you don't make the distinctions and when the statements are continually made to mislead people, they're extremely hard to correct.
Yes, but aren't we in a situation where the two support each other?
In other words, NASA wants their private little domain, and the space contractors, which build a lot of stuff for NASA, would, for their own self-interest, no doubt, support that position of NASA.
So for the people who think that Boeing or Lockheed or Ariane Space are going to jump on the bandwagon to build a cost-effective, reusable launch vehicle to carry cargo and passengers to and from space, it simply is not going to happen.
Lockheed and Boeing make $7 billion a year keeping the space shuttle flying.
The space shuttle employs roughly 25,000 people in very high-paying jobs at over five NASA centers.
There's not one congressman around who wants to see that cut from their district.
Yeah, they call it the equivalent of the B-52, which is still flying.
But they're getting ready To upgrade the space shuttle and make it modern, but the fact is they can't make it comply with the safety standards of a commercial airline, which is what you really need when you're going to take passengers to and from orbit.
Music Once again, Dr. Livingston, David M. Livingston specifically, welcome back.
Thank you.
I've just got a question before we bring Richard on with us.
Tex, I wonder how many guys are named Tex in Texas, he's in Austin, asked, how long will Intil space travel might be as safe as air travel?
Now, I would be willing to engage a risk that would be greater than that of air travel to go to space, I can tell you right now, but it is nevertheless an interesting question.
And when we actually met for lunch at that hotel at the UFO conference and you talked to my kids about creative thinking and how to analyze and look at things, they got a better education in one hour at lunch with you than they've ever had in school.
And you opened their minds to a way of looking at what they're being taught and what they read and what they see.
And my kids were pretty young at the time.
And I remember telling you, you should be a teacher because you really can open people's minds to whatever the topic is.
Well, you know, sitting here listening to you, I have very mixed emotions because part of me has been getting madder and madder.
I have looked at the space scene now, As you know, since I was with Cronkite, which is back in the mid-late 60s, early 70s.
And I remember conversations that colleagues and friends and I used to have, people in the science fiction field like Jerry Pornell, Robert Heinlein, my old friend G. Harry Stein, who's no longer with us.
Many of these people are no longer with us.
And we always used to talk about, you know, Heinlein's comment, which is once you're in low Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.
The hard part was getting that toehold in low Earth orbit.
And from there, the solar system and beyond was your oyster.
And we used to talk about all these plans that we had and others had, friends and colleagues and engineers that we knew for really chopping the costs of that first step.
It used to be that it cost, I think, now correct me if I'm wrong on these numbers, but back in the days of expendable launch vehicles, the Saturns and the Atlases and the first generation launch systems that we had in the 60s, it was like $1,000 a pound to get off the Earth and into orbit.
And the shuttle was supposed to drive that down by a factor of 10, to $100 a pound, and be reusable, and that was how you're going to get your cost savings.
Well, if I'm not mistaken, I heard Golden the other day say that the launch costs for the shuttle are now $10,000 a pound.
And as you were talking, I was thinking of all the times we've been lied to on so many fronts by this agency.
And one of the things I wanted you to do, David, is to give us some comparisons, some analogies for the other dangerous conquering of space that we did earlier in this century that went from a few brave people to ordinary Americans and citizens of the world flying all over the place and how long it took by comparison.
Because I don't think people listening tonight really understand how what a huge boondoggle this NASA thing has been, how there's been so much lip service and so little performance unless you give them a comparison with what other incredible frontiers we all conquered and have all benefited from in roughly the same time period.
Okay, and I think it's really important after I lay out this timeline to show why even mainline authorities on space tourism are accusing NASA of a cover-up.
But here's what happened.
In 1903, the Wright brothers had their famous flight.
And then in 24 years, we went to Charles Lindbergh in 1927, who crossed the ocean.
And then in 1939, we experienced our first trans-Pacific and transatlantic flight.
This was 36 years since the Wright brothers flight.
So we went from that plane and Kitty Hawk to crossing both oceans in 36 years.
Okay, in 30 years later, we made our first flight to the moon.
So technology advanced us the first time 36 years to crossing the ocean, then another 30 years, and we're landing on the moon on April 17th, 1972.
The answer is, I think, specifically a plan to keep the human race tethered to the earth because, you know, this is my perspective now, and David does not have to share this necessarily, but we found stuff.
And if you democratize space art, if you allow business and ordinary people and the Dennis Titos of the world to go out there and look with their own eyes, oh my God, at some point they're going to see something they're not supposed to see.
So what we have instead is this elite group of 145 astronauts who are being paid money.
And we have these people, we have 25,000 NASA employees At all these centers, and they run this space truck at $10,000 a pound to and from low Earth orbit, and they're doing what?
When we finally get the gem, what's supposed to be the next grand step, or as the Reagan people used to call it, the next logical step, we find that it's underpowered, it's undermanned, it can't carry out the experiments, it's been drawn out so long now that the projected costs of the space station will be $100 billion of our dollars.
And when one American, who is a pretty neat guy, used to be a rocket scientist, takes his own money to buy a ticket to go up there, he is absolutely furiously spat upon, not only by the head of NASA, but by every congressman and senator who opens his or her mouth on the idea that NASA, that space is anything but a NASA preserve.
I heard, remember we were talking about Cameron wanting to go?
Yes.
I understand that Golden made a comment, and I'm going to paraphrase here, but roughly he said that Cameron is a patriotic American because he's willing to wait until NASA's ready for him to go.
Senator McCluskey, Barbara McCluskey, I want to talk a little bit about her, not right now, but in a couple of minutes.
But Barbara McCleskey, the other day, on May 9th, on Wednesday, the same day that Greer was holding his disclosure press conference on the other side of town, McCluskey would not call Dennis Tito by name because in the committee hearing she said, we had a lot of problems with another guy named Tito.
So the comparison between Dennis Tito, American businessman, former JPL rocket scientist, and a dictator who gave us Yugoslavia and the Croatian and the Slovak problem, etc., I mean, this is beyond the pale, and you've got to stand back and say, what's really going on here?
There is a shrill sound coming from Washington, from NASA, and from the committee people who basically own space.
And what I find astonishing is that when you look at the polls, Space.com did one, USA Today did one, New York Times did one, the numbers in favor of Dennis Tito and tourism, even at the exorbitant price of $20 million, is running 75 to 80% in favor.
And yet to hear all these pundits and all the congressional people and Golden himself, you'd think that no one cared about space except them and that somehow this was a threat to the world-class research facility that we at currently, what, $26 billion in climbing have put into orbit that can't even function the way it was intended.
I'm beginning to think, frankly, gentlemen, that this is a scam, that the space station was sold to Congress on one level, but it has another set of purposes, and Dennis Tito's little trip threw a huge monkey wrench into the carefully laid plans of this elite group of elitists,
and that's what they're screaming about because they can see the handwriting on the wall, they can read the polls, and they're terrified as to what's coming down the pike, which is something which every American listening to us tonight should identify with.
Because Richard mentioned the word cover-up, and I mentioned it early with Dr. Collins.
And with Patrick's permission, I'm actually looking at a paper he delivered in February of this year to the FAA on their commercial space meeting.
And in 1998, NASA published a document called the General Public Space Travel and Tourism Document.
And we should talk about this at some point during the evening.
But this is an absolutely incredible document that talks about the profit potential of space tourism and the fact that we can do it right now with our technology right now and that it is going to be a huge money-making enterprise.
NASA refuses to put this document on their website, nor do they allow it to be distributed.
Well, Patrick, I was at the conferences when Patrick asked Golden to put this and challenge him to put it on the website, and Golden gave him sort of a wishy-washy answer.
And then at another conference, Patrick asked Lori Garver, who's the associate administrator, to put it on the website, and she said they would.
And they won't do it.
And if you know the acronym STA and you know how to use the NASA alternative search engine, you can eventually link to it, but it's still not on the NASA website.
But as Patrick says, NASA does not want the media, the politicians, teachers, a general public to know that we could start a passenger space travel service today at a public cost of a fraction of even one year's NASA budget.
Okay, well, there's two ways you could look at this.
One is, Richards, that there's something they don't want people to see, or, conversely, that their little private domain would look absolutely foolish if somebody were to do it economically and reasonably and easily and safely, and they could do all that with regular people who weren't making big bucks to be trained to be up there, which Mr. Tito certainly was not, except his NASA background.
So in other words, you could look at it two ways, cover up as in they might see something, or cover up as in their little private domain would be busted.
And here you have the most mainstream of all scientists and professors dealing with space tourism, the world's authority on it, and he is directly at an FAA meeting accusing NASA of a cover-up and accusing NASA of working for itself to protect a vested interest in its existing activities and not to achieve economic benefits for U.S. taxpayers.
I mean, these are Patrick's words.
And then he goes on and says NASA covers up this epic-making report and refuses to implement its recommendations.
I sent the actual link to this report to Keith, too, so hopefully it can get up there.
If not, maybe I can resend it if it needs to be re-sent during the break.
It's a long URL, so it wouldn't be feasible to give it over the phone.
But this is an incredible report.
And for mainstream people to come out and say there's a cover-up going on here and to challenge Golden and Lori Garber and to still not get any results, even they challenge them in front of 200, 300, 400 people, and it doesn't make a difference.
See, what's so interesting from my perspective is I was watching, you know, we were kind of engaged down here on EarthArt, remember, in the last couple of weeks?
And kind of on the far horizon, you know, the Dennis Tito thing was moving along slowly and Golan was throwing his conniption fits and his furniture out his windows and all that.
And suddenly, somehow, Tito gets them to agree, the Russians get them to agree, to let Tito go up.
Yes, I want to take a ride, and I'm sure many of you answer in the affirmative as well.
The only way that's ever going to happen is if we somehow wrestle space from the little private reserve that NASA has right now and open it up for everybody.
unidentified
It's gonna happen.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 11, 2001.
In fact, this one Redhead's name is Robin, so we have to give appropriate credit here.
From the Office of Personal Management General Schedule, the astronauts are paid on the GS scale, you know, government service 11 up to 14.
And for a GS11 guy who's, you know, a brand new astronaut gal or guy comes in, their minimum is $40,000, $39,178 a year.
But if they get up to a GS14, which some of the more seasoned astronauts are, they can make up to as much as $82,000 a year.
That does not count usual benefits, you know, vacation, sick leave, health insurance, etc.
So we're paying 145 of these people to basically go up and come down in a truck and to do what?
Because the station, and David can give you chapter and verse on this, is not as it has been advertised.
And the other thing was that when Tito went up, I was saying this before the break, what I noticed was right as he almost got there, like a couple days before his launch, when Endeavor was docked, they had this incredible multiple computer crash.
Every computer in the spacecraft went down in the station.
And then it took them a long time to recover, and they had to bring a hard drive back.
And I said on your show that I was very suspicious and frankly felt that they were wiping computer disks so that he wouldn't see anything.
And Golden admitted in front of the House hearing or the Senate hearing yesterday, which was a tape delay of the May 9th hearing, that this was impossible and they couldn't figure it out and they had teams of experts trying to figure out what happened.
Now, what was interesting is that it was only the non-essential systems.
David, didn't you find that interesting?
That the computers required to keep everybody alive and to keep the housekeeping going, they still functioned.
But the higher level stuff, all where the interesting stuff would be, what they were doing, the workloads, the shifts, the scheduling, those all went down.
And for the entire week that Tito was there, and this is recorded in several places, CNN, MSNBC, whatever, the astronauts supposedly, our American guys and Susan Helms, who's the one gallop there at the moment, were essentially doing nothing for the six days he was there.
Now, this to me is a screaming Hollywood type sign which says, what weren't they doing that they wouldn't have been doing except they had someone who wasn't a member of the club looking over their shoulder so they couldn't do what they would do?
We're paying these people $82, $65,000 somewhere around there per year, and every moment they're in space, it's taking them at $10,000 a pound, how much does it cost to send an astronaut into orbit?
All right?
If they weigh 200 pounds, that's 200 times 10,000.
Somebody do that quickly.
In other words, it's expensive to put a person in orbit.
The idea that you would keep them doing essentially nothing for a week while a visitor was there, who paid his own way, by the way, who's not coming off our tax doll, is just, it's totally absurd.
The more you look at this, I'm not surprised, David, that your friend stands up at a major conference and says, in essence, there's something weird going on here because there's something weird going on here.
Let me take you a dimension deeper because the United States has an absolute bona fide history and precedence of helping industries get started.
So when we were doing the Transcontinental Railroad, we had land grants.
When we were trying to get the airline industry off the ground, the Kelly Airmail Act was passed in 1925, and it subsidized the manufacturing of American airplanes in the airline industry.
When the biotech industry was getting started, they rushed to make it possible to have patents on biotech material, and all of a sudden they had value, and that industry had value.
When PCs were getting started, DARPA made a huge contract to get that happening.
The telecommunications industry, the United States government formed COMSAP, which was partially private, partially government.
The rest is history.
They helped fund the research program for communications and telecommunications with ECHO.
Well, I'm worried because it looks like the Bush administration is hell-bent on militarizing space, and we can talk about this now or later in the program.
But when you militarize space, that's completely 180 degrees away from commercial development.
Listen, I can go further than Richard in this regard.
Here's my view.
We worry a lot about a war, about ICBMs taking off from Russia or China or wherever all and heading toward the U.S. and we'd have what 35 minutes warning or 30 minutes warning or less, whatever it is.
Except for the subs and they get here pretty quickly.
However, if you had a bomb in space or several bombs in space, there wouldn't be any warning at all, would there?
In other words, you would simply see a city disappear.
The thing is, space, I believe, for defense is imaginable line.
If the enemy knows you're defending and you have a capability in space, then why would they try to attack you from space or in an area that space could make them vulnerable?
Well, if I was Russia, for example, and it was still the Cold War days, which frankly I still think it is in a lot of ways, and I wanted to have some sort of leg up on somebody who was building a space defense system, I'd have myself a few bombs in space.
Well, but see, I don't agree with David on that being the reason.
I'll give you a couple of very simple reasons.
The space station is crewed by successive three-man or three-person crews.
The first one was an American astronaut.
He was commander of the station, named the Shepard.
That's not an accident, by the way, and that's a whole other discussion.
The second is now captained by a Russian cosmonaut whose name escapes me at the moment.
He was the station commander when Tito arrived.
So we have the interesting scenario of two Russians came up on Soyuz with Tito.
One Russian is commanding the station.
Two Americans are with him.
So you had three Russians and three Americans.
But if Tito hadn't been there, it would have been a disproportionate number in favor of the Russians as opposed to Americans doing something on that space station.
And so I don't see that there's a military thing here aimed at any of the normal players, you know, East versus West, terrorist states, whatever.
I think if there is a military option going on here, David, it's against somebody out there, which brings us directly to Stephen Greer's conference.
And the idea that we are being visited by a whole bunch of people who are now attested to by a whole bunch of very credible military and other government sources who are willing to stand up and for the black ops people,
I will eat my fedora.
You know, that was the most satirical diatribe against taking these people seriously that you could do with a straight face and still keep your job.
And these people happen to have top secret clearances and happen to have been involved in this up to their eyebrows for their entire professional careers, and he just dismisses them in a couple of lines.
My point is that if, in fact, the station is an outpost on that phenomenon in orbit, because you've seen all the shuttle videos, you know, both of you probably, STS-48, STS-80.
And there's somebody upstairs doing things that our guys can't do and doing it on a dime and being shot at.
In other words, is the space station a command post to manage the potential war that is about to erupt upstairs against enemies?
I mean, I thought it was fascinating that the day before Greer's conference, Donald Rumsfeld, the current Secretary of Defense, comes out and makes a major space policy speech where he announces that we're going to weaponize space.
And part of the Greer initiative, part of the disclosure project, was to get legislation through hearings that would prevent the weaponization of space.
Well, if there's nobody left down here to be our enemy, the only enemies are going to be aliens, ETs.
Is that what we're building toward?
Is that what Tito is not supposed to see?
Is that what they're really doing up there because it's Russians and Italians and Germans and Japanese and Americans all together in some kind of planetary defense system with an outpost on the edge of forever?
There's a space plane that's designed with Bristol space planes in England called the Ascender, which could do suborbital flights.
There's a slightly larger model called Spacebus that could actually go up into orbit.
These are designs that could probably win approval and become successful, and they would be cost-effective.
And what has to happen is that somehow the financial industry and the markets, they have to start seeing credible business plans and they have to start seeing real opportunities in business with real business people, not just engineers and not just scientists touting they're going to use this kind of fuel or that kind of thing.
Well, I've actually just entered into a book deal with an agent in San Francisco to produce a book from my dissertation on how to make businesses in space viable.
And probably within a year, hopefully, we'll be able to put this book out on the market, probably called The Sky's the Limit, The New Space Economy.
But what we have to do is be credible.
And so far, the credibility has been lacking.
It is a problem.
And many of the ventures that are presented are bummers, to say the least.
See, this is one of the incredible, abysmal failures slash hidden agendas of NASA.
When I was listening to the show in the first hour, and David was going through the extraordinary hurdles that he faced in the academic community, where instead of treating him seriously, they burst into giggles when he mentions space tourism and space entrepreneurship.
That is, get this folks, that's 20 years after human beings walked on the moon.
We're not back in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon era.
We're supposed to be, I mean, there are most of the people in our audience tonight were actually born are after human beings walked on the surface of another planet.
And for there to be such isolation and insulation in the academic community that didn't even know it was possible to send tourists cost-effectively into space and that anybody wanted to come in the front door and do a dissertation on it was considered to be one step above Bozo the clown is an extraordinary indictment of NASA's failure to make space a part of human activity and everyday existence.
Let us, for the sake of this discussion, say that we could get $100 a pound, which is saying a lot.
But let's say that we get it.
If I wanted to buy a ticket for seven lovely days and nights, now actually in space you'd have, you could advertise it as probably about 300 lovely days and nights.
45 minutes per seven minutes, whatever the math would work out to.
In space, if I wanted to go to space for a week, what might it cost me at $100 a pound?
Well, hard to guess, but a lot of people are estimating the cost would be down to $1 million, to $1,000.5, and it'll stay that way for around 15 years.
Well, and there's even more that would pony up the kind of money that they spend to go climb Mount Everest.
Right, sure.
And getting to $100 a pound is going to be an evolutionary process in materials design and in launch characteristics and everything that goes into making a rocket.
And it really depends on the kind of technology that we're going to use, which is really something that we should talk about.
And it's the subject of a paper I'm trying to get up enough nerve to give because I find blowing firecrackers off to get people into orbit is a total absurdity.
I want to make a couple of points about the cost factor and how we can get you and me into orbit art.
Right.
Because I think David is being the conservative academic tonight.
And I applaud him for that because for a lot of people who this may have been an unbelievable idea, like his thesis advisors, they need someone who is conservative and who's giving them the worst case scenario.
But what you don't know is that NASA, meaning we, have paid for a tremendous number of technological studies and engineering developments that are basically just gathering dust and sitting on the shelf tonight.
Our space program, we've expended now if it's about, let's say it's $15 billion a year for the last 30 years.
That's a lot of money put into space and space development.
That money was not spent in space.
It was spent here on the ground.
And NASA used to pioneer and do cutting-edge work back when Dennis Tito was working at JPL.
There were all kinds of remarkable cutting-edge frontier concepts being funded, explored, you know, built, tested, and then they all put them on the shelf.
Like ion engines, solar sails, rocket sled transport.
We've only talked about firecrackers tonight, right?
It's a lot more viable if you don't have an atmosphere, but you can build it high like in the Andes or in the equator somewhere in Africa, and so you'd be above most of the atmosphere.
And if you design it out of the right materials, like the SR-71 was built out of materials so that it doesn't melt by the time it gets to the end of your track, you can economically launch passengers and cargo for a fraction of the shuttle.
And all of the various pieces have been invested in and built over the years.
It's just never all been assembled in one concept.
In other words, if people read the NASA report, and if people on Wall Street and people in Silicon Valley who have lots of money and want to do something interesting with it tonight, want to really make history and change the history of the human race from now on, and were to put money in some of these innovative concepts that are available in the public domain because we paid for it.
The American taxpayer paid for all this R ⁇ D. They could leapfrog a generation as opposed to starting from a standing start.
And you could have within five years, ten years, space access that would make it possible for you and me to go and do a show in orbit, circling the world tonight, as opposed to sitting here on the ground.
This is not pie in the sky, and we're not talking about anything that's at the edge of the paper, like electrogravitics and anti-gravity and all that stuff, which was part of the Greer conference.
We're talking about precedents earlier about what the U.S. has done to help industries get off the ground.
This is a prime example of how our government could use its money to help a space transportation system get off the ground that could help produce this industry that would be worth billions of dollars a year in 10 years and would produce a return, create jobs.
I mean, it would just be an incredible plus.
And the technology is here, the designs are here, and there's absolutely no help from the government and no support from NASA.
And again, I go back to these questions.
Why is it that to get humans off this planet, we are treated differently.
This industry is treated differently than every other new kind of industry that the U.S. government has stepped up to the plate and helped develop.
It's mind-boggling to me that this is going on and that nothing happens.
We've seen these shuttle videos that have come out of NASA, STS-48, STS-80.
Suppose Dennis Tito, sitting next to his big panoramic window listening to opera with his video camera, has got some astonishing footage of UFOs from orbit.
Just suppose, all right?
This is a question, of course, that you're going to ask him.
Well, during the SDS-80 mission, we know that the crew, while the incredible things that I brought that video down and showed you there in Purump, was going on outside, inside, the astronauts, we actually have a timeline.
We know what they were doing.
They were screwing bolts and nuts into a big metal plate with some kind of electric drill in the mid-deck of the shuttle.
Nobody was looking out the windows.
And everything that was captured on those cameras was being done by remote control from Houston.
But if that's going on, and we have a lot of other anecdotal evidence that those kind of activities, I mean, for many years, NASA would not show us after those videos came out any nighttime shots.
And it's at nighttime that you can see this stuff because these things are glowing.
And they're operating under a bizarre non-reaction regime.
In other words, they're not rockets.
They're real spacecraft.
They're real electrogravitic, anti-gravity, whatever you want to call them.
I like to call them hyperdimensional because that's the physics they operate under.
But the point is that how does a NASA cameraman sitting at a console in Houston know where to point a camera art to photograph UFOs if they're just aliens showing up on a non-scheduled tram?
Which means somebody has to be in the loop to know where to point the camera.
That implies we have either access to that technology or it is our technology and the whole NASA program, and David, the military program, is kind of like a sham.
It's kind of like a fake.
It's like one of those western towns where you go and look behind the general store and there's nothing there but a couple of boards holding it up.
You know, though, Richard, the only thing bigger than NASA and bigger than all of this, and the only thing big enough, in my opinion, to keep all of this bottled up would be the fossil fuel industry.
When you get to Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.
Can you imagine if you had a burgeoning, exploding, real-free enterprise system in low Earth orbit, hotels, business parks, you know, things being made, materials being brought down.
Max Vaget, who was the designer of the Mercury capsule and the Gemini capsule, told me in an auditorium, we were sitting in the back looking at something, you know, waiting for something to start.
And I said to him one day, I said, Max, could we take the shuttle to the moon?
And then he proceeded over the next half hour to lay out exactly how you could take this space shuttle, this albatross, this dinosaur and take it to the moon and bring it home safely.
You couldn't land it, but you could go into low lunar orbit.
It could be filled with tourists.
They could be pointing their Nikons and their digicons and whatever down and photographing guess what art on the lunar surface?
The artifacts, the structures, the ancient remains.
This is why NASA doesn't want you up there because once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.
Because once you're in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.
What you would do is you would take the external tank with you instead of dropping it in the Indian Ocean, which, by the way, doesn't have to be done.
David, do you know the studies on that?
That it actually, NASA is deliberately throwing a huge chunk of it away every time on every flight.
They don't have to, boys and girls.
They do it deliberately.
Because if you took the tank with you into orbit, you don't need to build a space park out of tanks.
There are reasons technically why that may or may not work.
But what you could do would be to drain the fuel that remains in the tanks, because there's quite a bit of fuel left in each ET when they cut it loose.
You would then put refrigerators up there, powered by solar energy.
You'd keep the hydrogen and the oxygen cold.
You'd stockpile enough fuel that then you could refuel a shuttle that goes up separately with its own engine, and then you could leave Earth orbit, go into orbit around the moon, come home, break, go back into orbit, and then come home like a normal shuttle.
The avionics, the electronics, what you put in the payload bay, the astronaut spacesuits, everything else we've already built.
You could take the shuttle to lunar orbit and bring it home again for a fraction of the cost of what we did on Apollo because we already have the infrastructure and they won't do it because they don't want us to see what's on the lunar.
I mean, look, we have so many studies, so much hardware, so much development that we paid for that's languishing, gathering dust in some ancient NASA archive because they don't want us off the planet.
We're supposed to stay home on the farm, and 145 people being paid $80,000 a year are the only ones to get to go at our expense.
See, one of the issues in getting off this planet is the lack of space infrastructure.
So, what Richard is talking about, essentially, an orbiting gas station, is another way for the government to help support the development of commercial space and space tourism by putting refueling stations in orbit so that they can assist these vehicles.
And this is another perfect way to help subsidize a new industry to get it started.
But again, it's another example of how we're not getting that assistance this time with helping a new industry get off the ground like we've gotten in so many other cases as new industries have developed in this country.
It's just not happening.
Yet there is a technology and there is an option and there is equipment where you could have orbiting gas stations that were perfectly safe that would help in getting this new industry off the ground.
Why did it take us 23 years to send the first mission after Apollo, after December, the December mission of Apollo 17 back to the moon, the unmanned Clementine?
Well, because there's stuff on the moon they don't want us to know about.
And remember, we now have some allies.
When Greer held his thing on Wednesday, one of my guys at ABC asked him the question, you know, Hogan's been talking about artifacts out there.
Are any of your whistleblowers, your witnesses, you know, confirming that?
And he said yes.
He said they've got one guy at Boeing and one guy at JPL who confirmed their artifacts on Mars.
And I don't know whether the moon was included in that, but since we know they're there, if they're confirming them on one place, they have to know about them on the other place.
The point is that this is the reason we're still down on the farm.
And unless we get people mad enough and fire it up enough and this audience directed enough to make a dent in the problem, it ain't going to change.
But I think we can affect a way to change it.
And with this program tonight, we can start.
And after we come back from the break, I have a couple of suggestions.
There's a group of very serious space entrepreneurs and business people, and they're meeting in Las Vegas for the third annual Lunar Commerce Conference in July.
And they actually have valid, real serious business plans for lunar commerce ventures and lunar settlements that make money.
And there's one company that I'm very well familiar with and may actually do some work with at some point.
There's this company, Applied Space Technology, that's actually going to send a mission to the moon and bring back moon rocks and moon samples on Earth.
on this somewhere in time well would you be right now?
love love you know I saw Miss Lucy down along the tracks lost a home and a family and you won't be coming back love well would you be right now?
love love midnight at the oasis send your camel to bed shadows painting our faces traces
the romance in our hands heavens holding a half moon shining just for a moon let's slip off through a sand do real soon kick up the little dove come on cactus is our friend feel pointed out
the way come on till the evening ends till the evening ends you know
don't have to answer There's no need to speak I'll be your belly dancer And you can be my sheep Now we take you back to the past on Art Bell somewhere in time.
Gosh, our tomorrows are here now the end of another show already facing us Can you believe it?
Another week gone?
Your tomorrows are here now.
So we can't wait a long time to get into space.
Our tomorrows are just happening one after another.
You must have noticed.
By the way, I want to thank everybody for sending me the picture of that 87-pound cat that's going around the internet right now.
But please stop.
I've got at least, I don't know, 25,000, 30,000 pounds worth of that 87-pound cat.
If you follow me, I've had it a lot of times, so I know it's out there, and I know you know I'm a cat lover, and so you send me that photo, but please stop.
I can't take anymore.
We'll get back to my guests, Dr. David Livingston and Richard C. Hoagland, in a moment.
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Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 11, 2001.
Well, I want to say something that's a little bit of a different tone, and then, Richard, you can do it.
But there really is no doubt that we're coming off this planet to live, work, and play.
And I'm almost 55, and it's going to be in my lifetime, assuming I live a normal lifetime.
And the Dan Goldens of the world, and the NASA's of the world, and the amount of money of the world may make it take a little longer, but it's in the process of happening right now.
It's unfolding.
It's no longer a question.
It is going to happen.
And what I want to put out there is we need to be really concerned and attentive to what we export from this planet because we have a lot of models for business and a lot of models for our culture that we just simply can't afford to seed space with.
The greed models, the secrecy models that we've been talking about tonight, we don't want this to be the way of our future generation in space because we're going to have people living on the moon, we're going to have colonies in low Earth orbit, we're eventually going to have people on Mars, and we can't seed the human race in space with what we've been talking about tonight.
We have to do better, and we have to take the best that the human spirit has to offer and the best that the human quality is for business and not the worst.
And all of us get a choice on what this space economy is going to look like.
And so as we lobby our people in Congress and as we fight for space commerce and as we cheer Dennis Tito and the ones that have come after him on and as we look for the alternative launch industry, just keep in mind what do we want it to look like and make sure we're striving for the best human nature.
RadioShack sells an item called a talking picture frame.
So for Father's Day, they came up with the idea to take the International Space Station astronauts, families here on Earth, and put messages on this talking picture frame and then have the astronauts do a commercial for Radio Shack to help sell this picture frame for Father's Day.
So of course the Russians jumped on it and are going to be doing it.
And NASA's code of conduct and policy does not allow NASA astronauts to do anything that smacks of commercialism.
Therefore, the only RadioShack commercial for this talking picture frame on the ISS is going to happen with the Russian astronaut.
So I mean it's just a little minor aside.
No, it's another evidence of the fact how NASA just can't seem to get a grasp on doing something that has to pay for it.
In other words, if I mean, you can just imagine the millions and tens of millions of dollars that would flow from anything advertised on the space station.
What was so interesting about the hearing that I've been watching with Golan and the senators is how all the senators kept talking about how Dennis Tito, visiting the station on his own nickel, was somehow demeaning this world-class research facility, which in the same hearings they pointed out can't do any research because it's only got three astronauts and two and a half of them are required to simply keep the thing in orbit.
So Barbara McCluskey, you know, this very intriguing lady who was demeaning Tito at every breath, was making the point that, well, how can you do any real research if you only have half an astronaut devoted to doing research, Dr. Golden?
And of course, the questions were never answered.
You know, this is all well and good, but we need to do something in the political realm to kickstart this thing further along than it is tonight.
And I have two recommendations.
One is our old friend John McCain.
When we needed John McCain to come out and go to bat for us on the Mars imagery, we got 70,000 images because Mike Mailan was scared to death and NASA behind him that John McCain would begin to delve and dig and probe beneath the surface as to why these pictures were being held for years past the contract date for Mike Mail.
I want to give out two fax numbers tonight.
And David, you will back me up on this.
Faxes are the way to go.
We now know that when senators get email, the staff just dumps it.
So emails are not The way to go.
Remember, way back when we started these campaigns with Dan Golden and getting pictures in 98, I said putting faxes on his office floor so the secretaries have to wade through the pile of paper to get to his desk.
Don't you think if a lot of Americans said to him tonight, you know, John, there's something going on that you ought to know about, and here's a NASA study that says we can make as a country billions of dollars by letting ordinary Americans get to orbit in an efficient way, a cost-effective, a safe way, don't you think John McCain might get a tad interested if a lot of people expressed interest in this, and he might turn to Dan Golden and say, you know, Danny, it's about time we kind of opened this system up.
So that's my first recommendation.
Fax John McCain at 202-228-2862 and let him know how you feel.
The other person I want you to fax, and I have a personal reason for this because I actually know this gal, is Senator McCluskey.
You know, I knew her when she wasn't a senator.
I knew her when she was just a representative.
We spent a very windy and chilly night on the top of the building at Times Square where they lower the New Year's Eve ball.
There was a whole group of us up there, and, you know, it was kind of interesting to watch how she has matriculated into this bitter and acerbic and extraordinary elitist person because she didn't used to be that way.
That's in her Washington, D.C. office in the Hart Senate building.
202-224-8858.
It's Senator Barbara McCluskey, spelled M-I-K-U-L-S-K-I.
She's a Democrat from Maryland, the senior senator from Maryland.
And she needs to hear from people that a lot of you think it's time for us to go.
It's time for us to get up there.
It's time for us to democratize this extraordinary experience Dennis Tito was just gloating about when he came back.
And if enough people send faxes to Ms. McCluskey, she will get the point that she is so out of step with the American people, and maybe enough people would get mad enough at her to actually go into Maryland and say, you know, Senator, you don't deserve to be re-elected.
Well, are you two actually confident that we could really get this done?
I mean, getting some pictures kicked out of Malin's office is one thing.
Getting something the size of what we're talking about underway and changing the forces that have kept it the way they've kept it for so long, I don't know if a fax campaign will do that or not.
Oh, because the Russians have Golden over the proverbial barrel.
They have the Soyuz's.
Golden needs those Soyuz escape vehicles.
So every time the Russians go up, they said they're going to fill that third seat with a paying guy.
And there ain't nothing that Golden can do about it.
So we're going to have more examples.
Number two, because of the NASA study and all the other studies David's talked about tonight, we know there is tremendous amounts of money to be made in orbit.
And as he also laid out earlier in the program, the main impediment on Wall Street is to thinking it can be done.
They know there's money to be made, but they think there's no way to get from A to Z. Now we know, they know there's a way to get from A to Z. So with these two forcing functions and a little bit of leadership in the Congress from John McCain and this audience using the cattle prods, I think some pretty astonishing things can happen because we're right at the edge of the razor blade.
We're at that point where when you blow on it or push it with a feather, it will fall off the cliff.
And I'm seeing the business plans coming in that are reasonable and realistic.
I'm seeing a different quality in the way the papers are being presented and the types of programs.
I'm seeing a lunar Conference where they're actually presenting viable plans to do business on the moon and in lunar orbit and on lunar missions back and forth.
And these people aren't wasting their time.
They're anticipating that all of this is going to happen and unfold in a reasonable amount of time.
And the groundwork is being laid for it right now.
And Dennis Tito broke these windows open.
And it's just going to, I believe, keep growing and growing and growing.
Maybe a little slow for a while, but it's there.
And as I said earlier, the Dan Goldens of the world, the Laurie Garvers of the world, the governments of the world are not going to be able to stop it.
One of the indicators that David is right is the shrillness coming out of Washington from people like McCluskey and Bond and Golden.
Because if they didn't see the handwriting on the wall, if they didn't know how important Tito was symbolically in breaking the log jam, in making the financial community say, oh yeah, it's possible, they wouldn't be so scared.
Here's an important note, and Dennis observed it when he came back at his homecoming in Los Angeles the other day, that NASA has done a superb job of making the space program boring.
I mean, what could be more boring than to see people assembling something in orbit?
I mean, we are really bored with it.
It is not like Apollo at all.
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Dennis comes back, and this guy is in seventh heaven.
And Frank White wrote a book a few years ago called The Overview Effect where he interviewed all of the people that have been to orbit, including the civilians that went up before the Challenger accident.
And when you read about their experiences and their spiritual transformations and what they looked at when they saw the Earth without boundaries or they saw pollution or fire and they saw the Earth as an entire unit rather than all these little nation-states warring and fighting.
Bill Nelson, the congressman, said, damn it, everybody who's running for office should come up here on the space shuttle and see the Earth before they go into office.
The Saudi Arabian prince, when he flew over the Middle East, he said, there's no boundaries between the Arabs and Israel.
What are we doing having this fighting?
And he said paragraph after paragraph added.
He was totally transformed.
And maybe that's what this is all about.
That the power that is derived from political systems that are still in place today, from the geopolitical state, maybe that power just can't be weakened in any way.
And when you see the Earth and you have this overview effect, that's what it's called, and this transformational experience, even the astronauts have it.
The Russians have it.
Maybe they just can't afford to let people have that because the power for transforming this planet will be so phenomenal.
And Frank White would be a fabulous guest for you to have on your show about this overview effect, and off the air I can give you his contact information.
Well, I guess we'll have to save my story of Project Harvest Moon to the next time.
But I do want to end on this note.
We've been talking tonight about conventional technologies, about things NASA's paid for, rockets, electromagnetic systems launching from the ground, flyback shuttles, all that, and what's needed to get them to where they're commercially viable so they can handle the volume of traffic that these studies, particularly the NASA study, projects would be adequate to reaching low Earth orbit and getting people the experience of their lives at a reasonable price.
But let's talk about for a couple of minutes here the wildcard, which is what Greer held his press conference on Wednesday about.
Sure.
If all those people are telling us the truth, hell, if tenth of those people are telling us the truth, remember, it only takes one white crow to prove all crows aren't black.
So if one of those people is telling us the truth of his 400, it means there is a stunning technology hidden in the black intelligence, military, industrial community that if it was turned loose, if it was democratized, if it was made public, would make it possible for you and me, Art and David, to go visit ISIS in 10 minutes.
All right?
And that's what can happen with political pressure as well.