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March 17, 2007 - Art Bell

02:38:00

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Space Ventures and the Paranormal - Robert Bigelow

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	From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, prolific as they are in each and every one of them, covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Art Bell.
	It is my honor and privilege to be escorting you through this weekend, a good one it shall be, this night.
	And I've got so much to say about this.
	Robert Bigelow is going to be here.
	Mr. I'm-Gonna-Put-A-Hotel-In-Space.
	And, uh, he's not kidding.
	In fact, uh, he's got one satellite up now.
	The other is either launched or about to be launched.
	This guy's real serious.
	And, uh, to prove it, you might want to peruse some of the photographs that I've got up there.
	They just went up on the website just before air time.
	Now this is the visit that Aaron and I made to Bigelow Aerospace, and I held most of the photographs back.
	In fact, Bob would probably do well to go up there and peruse them himself.
	I'm sure he's not seen them, so they're going to be a surprise for him as well.
	A lot of his equipment.
	is pictured.
	It's absolutely fascinating stuff, so you might want to get up to the website and peruse that ahead of the interview, which I'm going to begin at about 15 after the hour.
	This hour.
	Just a couple of things that I want to get out of the way.
	As you know, last weekend I was in Los Angeles, and I received an award, a very great honor it was indeed, from Radio and Records.
	And I will not burden you with any thank-yous here.
	They came in a little speech that I made thanking them, and that too is on the website.
	You can hear it.
	So that was kind of cool.
	We did get to go to Disneyland after that affair, and that was way cool.
	We got to, if you haven't seen the California experience or the California whatever it is, The IMAX presentation, oh my God, you've got to see it.
	It's just nothing short of incredible.
	All right, for those of you who have listened to the program for years, you're going to know what I'm about to say.
	For some of the rest of you, you won't.
	So let me tell you a little story.
	Years ago, Ramona and I went to Paris.
	Actually, we loved Paris.
	It was one of our favorite places and we were there Any number of times, but on this occasion we were on the far outskirts of Paris, and we went into a little Italian restaurant run by an Italian guy.
	This is now a decade ago.
	I guess it's a decade ago.
	Better part of a decade ago.
	And we ordered a cheese pizza.
	We were hungry.
	And he brought out this incredible sauce that he had made of about 16 herbs, And anyway, it was just unbelievably good.
	It took this pizza and it made it, it made it magic.
	And Ramona was very good at this kind of thing.
	So she sat at the table and deciphered what these herbs were.
	She was just very good at that.
	And we came back to the U.S.
	and she put together What we now call, and ten years ago, eight years ago, whatever it was, I told you about it, it was to be called Pizza Punch.
	Well, guess what?
	After all of these years, let me add a little more, we produced, you know, right here at the house, some Pizza Punch.
	And we decided we would test market it.
	So we took it down, we took it down to a local pizza parlor, And they offered it to their customers who went berserk over it.
	And they couldn't get enough of it.
	And we couldn't supply enough of it.
	It was crazy.
	Just people went berserk over it.
	It was so good.
	And so I was contacted by a man a few years ago now who said, look, we might be able to make this pizza punch.
	And longtime listeners know this has, you know, kind of been in the works for years.
	Well, finally, tonight, if you would like to try Pizza Punch, you can do it.
	There is now a website up.
	It's called ArtbellsPizzaPunch.com.
	That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L-S Pizza Punch, P-I-Z-Z-A-P-Y-N-C-H, all strung together.
	ArtbellsPizzaPunch.com.
	And you can order some and give it a try.
	It is amazing stuff.
	Absolutely amazing.
	In fact, the whole story of Pizza Punch is really up there on the website.
	You can read about the history of it, how we found it, how we developed it, and all the rest of it.
	So it's now called Art Bell's Pizza Punch, but it ought to be Art and Ramona Bell's Pizza Punch.
	I guess my name being the one they used it.
	Anyway, there you've got it.
	A certain amount of the proceeds, if there turn out to be any, will go to the Asthma Foundation directly.
	So there you've got it.
	Pizza Punch.
	People have been bugging me for years and years and years and years about this.
	So if you want to give it a try, you can locate it at ArtbelsPizzaPunch.com.
	And I really, really, really would like your input on this.
	It was kind of a love of ours.
	And very carefully and lovingly developed, and I never thought that I would have a food product, and in a sense, I guess I don't.
	It's just there.
	If you want to give it a try, if you are curious, after all these years, if you're curious about a new product, something really cool, this is it.
	ArtbelsPizzaPunch.com.
	A-R-T-B-E-L-L-S-P-I-Z-Z-A-P-U-N-C-H.
	And punchitdoes2.com.
	So there you have it.
	It'll be available.
	It's actually, I think even if you ordered it now, you couldn't get it until April... April 1st, is it?
	I don't know if that'd be a good date.
	Yep, April 1st.
	Ship's April 1st.
	It's not a joke though, that's for sure.
	Alright.
	Beyond that, there is a photograph right now on the website, under Art Bell's webcam, and if you want to take a look at that, you're welcome to.
	I caught Aaron and our other little immigrant, our little Manila kitty, both asleep on the couch.
	Pregnant women do a lot of that, sleeping.
	And I thought it was so cute, and so I snapped a photograph, and that is it.
	So there's a lot of stuff on the website to take a look at tonight, including, of course, that photograph I just mentioned.
	And all of these photographs of the Bigelow Aerospace Facility, I mean, we really got in and got to look at everything.
	The only thing not included In that array of photographs is an actual picture of the satellite, the second satellite itself, which was totally proprietary.
	Looks like someone's telling me the web server crashed on Pizza Punch.
	That only took about a minute.
	All I can tell you is... It's already down.
	Got about five people on there saying it's already down.
	Sorry.
	The people who run that website, I'm sure, will do their very best to get it back up again, so just write it down and try later.
	Or tomorrow, or something.
	People have been waiting years for that, so I knew it was going to get hit hard.
	I didn't know it would only last seconds.
	Just write it down.
	Artbellspeedpunch.com.
	Okay, in a moment, Robert Bigelow graduated from Arizona State University with a Bachelor
	of Science degree in Business Administration.
	In 1999, he founded Bigelow Aerospace.
	Bigelow Aerospace is a general contracting, investment, research, and development company
	that concentrates on achieving economic breakthroughs in the costs associated with design, development,
	construction of habitable space stations.
	Space transportation and launch facilities to the extent that they will be affordable for private enterprise use.
	Robert Bigelow is active and a member in various business and scientific community organizations.
	He is a member of the UNLV Foundation and an associate member of the Society for Scientific Exploration.
	He is my HR Hadley.
	He's a billionaire who decided at his late age, or I should say our late age, we're nearly the same age, to take all this money he had amassed in private industry and go to space.
	Now, who in the world does that?
	I think it was Mr. Bigelow who told me.
	Aerospace is a business that will very quickly turn billionaires into millionaires, and then less.
	But that's what he's doing.
	Hopefully not getting turned into a millionaire or less, but certainly going to space.
	In fact, he's already there.
	So, he's not a man who just talks.
	He's a doer.
	And if you doubted after seeing these photographs, well then just stay by your radio, turn the volume up a little bit, because what you're about to hear We'll blow your mind.
	In a moment, Bob Bigelow.
	Alright, again, I would like to emphasize the man you're about to hear is not just a talker.
	He's a doer.
	He's already sent one satellite into space, if not two, and if the second hasn't gone, it's about to go.
	And he's got little creatures, bugs and that sort of thing that he's doing environmental testing with.
	By all means, make it up to coast2coastam.com and look at the photographs that I took of his facility.
	It's quite a facility.
	Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas.
	And I haven't released these to anybody until tonight, until this very moment, actually.
	And I guess Bob will get a chance to see them.
	He can probably sit where he is and peruse the photographs, because they literally just went up at airtime.
	So, ladies and gentlemen, if we're ready, here is Bob Bigelow.
	Bob, welcome to the program.
	Hey, Art.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	Good evening.
	Great to have you.
	Hey, have you had a chance to go to the website?
	You know, I'm sitting in a room that's not where my computer is.
	It's in a different area, but I generally remember the photos that you took, the positions that you were in, and so I kind of remember them.
	They're very, very good photographs, Bob, and we'll sort of go through them.
	Incidentally, we figured a way out to kind of expose the G-2, the Genesis-2 spacecraft And still comply with the restraints of ITAR, you know?
	Okay, stop, stop, stop.
	Tell everybody what ITAR is.
	Well, ITAR is a rather ominous agency, regulatory feature of the Department of State, and its intent is to protect this country from the export of information that could have derogatory effects.
	And so in its scope and sweep of implementation, it covers a multitude of things, some of which probably should not need to be covered.
	And so we have to be very cognizant of anything that we expose on the website or other ways that we don't reveal something that could be objectionable.
	What is ITAR?
	What is ITAR? What is the acronym?
	It stands for the International Treaty on Arms and Munitions and Regulations.
	Wow.
	And so what we've done is kind of tricked out the, what we did was we photographed the spacecraft by turning all the lights off in the room where we started there.
	So we turned all the lights off and then we created various kind of lighting enhancements that were kind of obscure.
	And then we took and we overlaid a fog over the pictures So that you kind of see this outline and the shape and some things bleeding through and some kind of instrumentation and it looks kind of cool actually.
	Okay.
	So what I'm going to do is find a way to get those photographs to you as soon as I can.
	And I think you'll like them.
	All right.
	Let's update where things are.
	You launched your first spacecraft when?
	July the 12th of last year.
	July 12th last year, and you had some biologics on the spacecraft, and you had a lot of, I guess you had cameras, you had communications gear, you're a private citizen putting a spacecraft in orbit, and in orbit it still is, right?
	Oh, definitely.
	It'll be there for, some forecasts are As long as 13 years and probably no less than 10 years depending upon solar flare activity.
	Wow.
	Now, you've got a second spacecraft which I had the privilege to actually see in person when I was at Bigelow Aerospace and it was going to be launched and I don't know whether you can discuss the current status of it or not.
	Can you?
	Yes, I think we can.
	I think we can.
	Where are we?
	We are expecting a launch the week of the 19th and out of Russia, of course.
	We have been told initially that we were expecting a launch on the 30th of January and that got bumped because of events that took place.
	Subsequent to our launch last year in July, they had a failure of Another launch, carrying other satellites.
	Okay.
	And that's a big deal.
	Sure.
	And so it dominoed on us, and the result of it was that everything slid north, schedule-wise, and so our schedule got bumped from the 30th of January to, we were told later, we were told that the 1st of April was the expected date, thereabouts, and now we have confirmation that that is going to occur Definitely in the week of the 19th.
	In fact, we're shipping a spacecraft out very soon, because we have to be there about a month or so, or maybe four or five weeks ahead of the actual launch date.
	If you were to articulate the difference between the first spacecraft and this one, what would the high points be?
	The high points are that this is a sister spacecraft in terms of its size is virtually identically the same.
	But what we've done is significantly altered the payloads and we're flying a number of things that the Genesis One is not flying.
	And we're flying reaction wheels, we're flying multiple gas tanks, air tanks that are manifolded.
	Almost twice as many cameras.
	We're flying, of course, the Fly Your Stuff program for folks, which is kind of a fun thing that we're doing.
	It's not necessarily tied into the mission of the spacecraft.
	We're flying a suite of avionics that are significantly enhanced over what G1 had in terms of redundancy and other kinds of... We're trying other people's products out.
	So these are testbed Pathfinder spacecrafts, and all of them are intended to try to validate Various kinds of hardware, various approaches from everything to fabricating different hardware and assembling, integrating it all together to various companies' systems.
	Each one is a gamble.
	Each one is a situation where it's not only the launch itself that we keep our fingers crossed over, but it's actually the performance of all kinds of stuff on each spacecraft.
	The average American citizen thinks, I believe, that, you know, if somebody like yourself, a private individual, private citizen, decides to invest a lot of money and put something in space, then it's only your business.
	But that's just not true.
	Is it?
	ITAR is there, you are watched over by our government, probably other governments, everybody in sight watches over you, don't they?
	Well, yeah, and you know what, Art?
	I think the way to express this level of intensity You know, we've all, God knows, technology is a huge grunt, and to say the least, we're always on pins and needles as to what technological apparatus actually works or fails.
	But, if you're looking at the hierarchy of sharks that can bite you, that can really hurt you in this business, I look at it this way.
	I put technology as kind of the foundation.
	It's the lower level, very, very serious, but not Quite as serious as some of the next things, and I think the next thing is money.
	Alright.
	You know, if you have enough money, you can pretty much buy a lot of different kinds of technology and eventually get what you want.
	Above that, I think is management.
	Because if you screw up the management of your money, then it really doesn't make much difference, you know, if you can't appropriate it right, or even if you don't have enough of it, then you're in serious trouble.
	So management is crucial.
	And we know some You know, some examples where poor management of money sometimes hasn't resulted in much benefit.
	But above that, you're getting into an area now that's the most lethal, and that is politics.
	And there probably isn't anything that's worse, because you have no control over that subject.
	You know, you're at the mercy of a lot of people that just flat don't care.
	You know, and you're actually making them go to some trouble that maybe they'd rather not have to go through, and so politics to us is a big friggin' deal.
	It is no small nightmare that we have to deal with.
	We have a fantastic Washington office, and they devote 90% of their time to this ITAR subject, you know, trying to satisfy the Department of State and other agencies, and it's a big deal.
	Well, you know, it shouldn't be a big deal.
	Now, obviously, we don't want to give away priceless technology to enemies.
	There is that.
	But that issue aside, it seems to me that could be handled... Alright, there's the music.
	Hold tight, Bob.
	Okay.
	It seems to me that ITAR could be handled in a sensible...
	Non-political way.
	But as I guess we all know, the world is not non-political.
	The world is nothing but politics.
	And so we'll talk about that tonight.
	We'll talk about how hard it is for a private citizen to endeavor to do what NASA has done, and perhaps more.
	Here I am.
	My guest is Bob Bigelow, my H.R.
	Hatton, and He's launching spacecraft, number two's going up next month, week of the 19th.
	Now, all of this is not just to launch spacecraft.
	This is all headed toward a goal.
	And that goal is a hotel in space.
	Ultimately, a hotel in space.
	And if you want to see how it's going to go together, if you want to see how the modules are configured, go to the website, coasttocoastam.com.
	Aaron and I went to Bigelow Aerospace.
	We got to take pictures of modules.
	Habitable, ultimately habitable modules.
	Modules that may well take you in your lifetime to space.
	Can you imagine that?
	Think about that.
	You, certainly your children, but you.
	This is a our lifetime kind of thing.
	This is a 2012 Kind of thing.
	When we're talking about getting some of you to space, we'll be right back.
	So in other words, if you were a private citizen and you wanted to put a spacecraft in orbit, ultimately a hotel in orbit, You'd be concerned about technology, of course, and money, and then the management of money, but more than any of those you'd be concerned about politics.
	Bob, is there any way, and this is something we, you know, we talked about this when I was there, That the audience can help you out.
	Is there any way to cut through some of the red tape?
	Because in a moment I'm going to have you describe what NASA is doing and the gap that we're facing in terms of our capability to get things into space.
	And that's going to shock a lot of you.
	And you're going to know then that we need the Bob Bigelows of the world.
	So Bob, is there anything the audience politically can do to help your case out?
	You know, since you asked me that question, Art, I've been pondering that and I wish that I had a positive solution and say, oh yes, only if we just did this one thing.
	But it's really, as we'll find out here in this discussion tonight, it's so entwined and kind of a self-choking situation.
	There isn't any one simple solution, necessarily, and the political aspects of space really are part of, it's what really induces part of the problems that NASA is having today, even.
	And so even NASA is hamstrung by politics that completely surrounds this subject.
	Who owns space?
	Who owns space?
	Yes.
	Does anybody own space?
	Does anybody own the moon?
	Does anybody own Mars?
	That answer changes according to the geography that is the target.
	If you're talking about, you know, there are air rights over real estate, over land, and each country has a different, each sovereign country can dictate more or less where its air rights stop, and that changes from country to country and when you go to talk
	about the moon and other celestial bodies
	you encounter the sixty seven uh... moon treaty and uh... which the united states is a part and you know
	that's a piece of of uh...
	a treaty that that uh... has constrictions as to
	who can do what you know so that then that's actually something that's in
	debate as to whether or not it's even valid and and that's quite a
	complex what what are the bomb one of the basics of it
	I mean, what does it say?
	What can we and can't we do?
	I don't need all the details, but I mean the big picture.
	Well, it was passed in 1967.
	A lot of countries were not part of that, and so at that point in time, it was anticipating that there was a mad lunar rush, and so the treaty wound up.
	Dictating that it was to be used for the general good of mankind.
	And essentially you could put a base on the moon, you could operate it like Lomerto in the Antarctic, but you couldn't really, you could never use it for military purposes, which is a good thing.
	And you also would be, if you were to put any kind of business enterprise affiliated with the moon, it would fail because it would be required that that enterprise be sort of a charitable kind of operation. It would be
	something that would be for the good of mankind essentially, but
	the language really is vague, and so there's ambiguity as to what the
	private sector might be able to do versus the sovereign countries, and
	there's a lot of countries that never agreed to anything because they never
	signed the the treaty. Okay, let's say the Chinese
	got into space, and they are getting into space, Bob, and they
	flew to Mars somehow.
	They got to Mars and planted a Chinese flag on the red soil.
	Right.
	What would that mean?
	Oh, that'd be great.
	Because we would all go out there and kick ass to try to beat them.
	Well, that's true.
	So the moment we knew they were going to even try it, I suppose we'd have money to go back to space.
	I would love to see that.
	You'd love to see it?
	I absolutely would love to see it.
	Your facility is astounding.
	And again, folks, if you want to see what the facility looks like, part of it anyway.
	I took pictures of as much as I was allowed to.
	For example, that giant machine, Bob, can you explain about that?
	It's a big orange monster.
	Yeah, that's a special CNC machine that is a computerized machine that can handle a 14 foot square billet that might
	weigh thousands and thousands of pounds because it could be 10 or 12 inches
	thick and it's just the kind of thing that we use to make full-scale bulkheads from
	because you as I tell the guys we're really good at taking nice size
	large pieces of aluminum and lining up with a whole lot of shavings over
	here.
	But seriously, that's what the purpose is, is you make a one-piece, unibody construction of an isogrid billet for an isogrid bulkhead out of that billet.
	Okay.
	Further on, we've got a lot of pictures of your control room, and this is an area where you have controllers sitting at consoles.
	We didn't happen to catch them at the consoles at that point, but they monitor and communicate with the spacecraft.
	Is that correct?
	That's true.
	You probably scared them, Mark.
	They were probably in hiding because... So anyway, but that's true.
	They are there, and we now capture We have three stations scattered in, the one that you saw, and then we have receiving and sending stations in Alaska and Hawaii.
	So we will be, with Genesis 2 flying, we will be in constant communication five hours a day.
	Five hours a day.
	And so the more stations you have around the globe, the more communications you have, obviously.
	Yeah, and that's crucial.
	We're looking to try to have maybe a couple of dozen Eventually, about 24 stations, but we're at least anticipating adding two as a minimum per year, maybe three per year, between now and O-10.
	And O-10, you know, is a date in which we intend to launch Sundancer, which is intended to be an occupiable module.
	And by that time, we should have in the order of perhaps 10 10 stations at least.
	And that's not too bad.
	Not bad at all.
	Yeah, we'll be in fair communication.
	Alright, now further on, photos 15, 16 will give people some idea of the interior of what ultimately is going to go up there and turn into, and we should talk about this a little bit, I don't know what it's going to turn into.
	Is it going to turn into, I suppose at first, Bigelow astronauts will be occupying this immense amount of space, and it's a lot of space.
	In fact, as you go down the photographs, 18, 19, 20, take a look, 21, the outside of these modules, these will be, these are pressurized modules that Bob has built, and will be building, mock-ups of them here.
	They're big.
	They're going to be big enough to ultimately be a hotel in space, aren't they, Bob?
	Well, let me back up just a little bit and give some credit here to NASA, and then we'll go on forward to the use and the structures and like that.
	We acquired, I actually was introduced to this expandable technology through, started off being a magazine article.
	And I was astounded to learn that NASA had created this kind of technology, and of course, by the infinite wisdom of Congress, their program was cut.
	This is part of the politics problem we're talking about, right?
	So, they lost their funding.
	And through some phone calls I made and one thing led to another, I come to find out the program was not being pursued.
	So we started pursuing it and then eventually we acquired licenses to their patents and we acquired patents of our own.
	And so essentially what you have is an expandable system that provides In our particular scale of things, about three times the interior volume of any module that's flying on the International Space Station right now.
	Good Lord.
	So that's a good thing, because every launch is very expensive, so any time that you could triple the value, the volume of space, you kind of triple the value, so to speak, of the module itself per launch.
	So you're putting each launch to very good use.
	That's part of the value of these systems is the volume that they can carry.
	The other value is the safety.
	Because of the shielding involved and also because of the designs for our radiation protection, These systems are safer to be inside than the conventional construction of aluminum, solid aluminum structure is.
	Okay, is it reasonable for you to explain the difference, or are we getting into guarded territory?
	Oh, no, no, we can.
	We can do that in fairly kind of, you know, general terms.
	I can't name names of materials and things like that, but we can in general terms because there's already quite a bit out in the literature on this.
	Okay, how much safer?
	Well, years ago we did some hyper, what they call, the ballistic tests are called hypervelocity impact tests.
	And we did this on, we performed these tests on some old shields, shield architectures.
	And these tests showed that the projectiles that we shot into our own shields sustained the impacts very well.
	And just obliterated the targets that we used that were exact mock-ups of the strongest insulated and mechanically prepared portions of the hull of the modules, the best constructed modules on the ISS.
	And just obliterated.
	In fact, it didn't punch a hole in it.
	It actually unzipped these pieces to where it fractured them so badly We thought, well, if this had been a real incident, it might have gone from bulkhead to bulkhead.
	That penetration was so violent.
	But in our shields, it didn't exit the targets.
	So from that standpoint, NASA knows this.
	In fact, the original intent for these structures by NASA was to use them as a dormitory for the ISS and for deep space missions going to Mars.
	That was the whole point.
	So this isn't some concoction of ours that we said, oh gee, we laid awake one night and just dreamt this up.
	This was the guy that was the principal fellow on the team was Dr. Bill Schneider.
	In fact, he has been a consultant to us for years now and he had some excellent fellows and gals under him and on their whole team and of course that all was disbanded when the program was killed.
	Why was it killed, Don?
	Well, I won't give names of particular congressmen, but there was a particular congressman who was the chairman of
	a certain committee.
	And he felt that NASA was being distracted and wanted to have them maintain their focus in other directions and that
	this kind of system might...
	Encourage NASA to be too invigorated about going to Mars.
	It was called the M-word at that time.
	They would say, well, don't say the M-word here around the halls of headquarters or JSC or wherever.
	Don't talk about Mars.
	That's not the word you want to use.
	So again, that's the silliness of politics.
	I guess.
	But not mention the word Mars.
	Mars was unmentionable because?
	It wasn't the agenda.
	It was not approved as an appropriate agenda for, at that moment in time, at that point, and this goes back to 1999 and 2000, and it was not appropriate.
	There was this application to use this structure as a dormitory for the ISS, but somehow that was drowned in the noise of, instead of it you know, being something that could be looked upon as
	applicable to Mars.
	So, you know, it was a good program that should have continued.
	Yeah, it should have.
	I don't get it, Bob.
	There's a breaking news story from Pasadena right now.
	New measurements of Mars South Pole region are indicating extensive frozen water.
	Now listen, the polar region contains enough water to cover the entire planet in a liquid layer about 11 meters or 36 feet deep.
	In other words, cover all of Mars to 36 feet deep.
	That's a lot of water, Bob.
	It is.
	It is.
	It makes you think that that planet offers tremendous potential, particularly for countries that have a lot of population, but maybe not a lot of land mass.
	That's an awful lot of water.
	I guess water is necessary for life.
	Water is necessary for fuel, correct?
	Correct.
	So, if we're to go to Mars and come back and or do that trip on any sort of regular basis at all, we have to have water there because water is real heavy and you can't launch a whole bunch of it from Earth, right?
	That's correct.
	You need to have, we incorporate water as part of our radiation shielding because we intend to Use that in a certain way that helps to provide supplemental protection for deep space missions.
	Or even for long tours of duty in LEO, but deep space is worse once you exit LEO.
	LEO, Low Earth Orbit.
	Right.
	You've got to remember, a lot of us are not all up on all of these.
	By now, you've been doing this so long, the acronyms just fall right out of your mouth.
	I've gotten written all over my t-shirts and everywhere, on the dashboard of my car, you name it.
	It gets confusing.
	Do you remember the moment in your life, Bob, when you decided to make this unbelievable investment in going to space?
	Well, I made a commitment.
	I never knew exactly what direction it was going to take because it was so many years ago and I just kind of had a general passion and feeling that By God, I was going to get involved in some major way, and it happened just when I was a kid.
	And, you know, I've told you that story, and sometimes when you're a young kid, you get something in your head because of an event or a story that someone has told you about, and you never forget it.
	And that's lived with me all my life.
	Yeah, but as an adult, I guess for some years you've had It's not reasonably the financial structure to be able to do something like this.
	There must have been a moment, though, as an adult when you said, oh, to hell with it.
	Let's do it.
	Well, yeah.
	That actually occurred in about 1997.
	I felt that I was financially ready and that I had waited long enough.
	And that's when I started casting about, looking for what the hell to do.
	Mm-hmm.
	And then ultimately to get anything into space, including the satellites that you're now launching, you had to go to Russia instead of the U.S.
	You had to go to Russia to get your stuff launched.
	You're still doing that.
	And that's got to be a big story.
	Why Russia?
	Why not the U.S.?
	Oh, it is a big story.
	It's a good news, bad news kind of story.
	And the good news was that Russia, fortunately for us, Has been a fantastic asset, actually, for us, because without them we wouldn't have anything in space.
	And we had, at the same time, we had multiple lines in the water, of course, on everything that we do, and we try to anyway, and so we had another agreement and contract with an American company, but the American company just didn't come through.
	And so, thank God, we had the other lie in the water with the Russians, and they did, and they've been tremendous to work with.
	In addition to that, folks, unless I'm wrong, I believe every time you launch a satellite, Bob, it's an SS-18.
	Which is one of the Soviet Union's biggest assets in terms of carrying multiple warheads to the United States and elsewhere around the world for what would have been a horrible war.
	So they use SS-18s.
	Is that correct, Bob?
	It is correct.
	We just asked them to remove the...
	The warhead on the missile that was aimed at Las Vegas, and please put our spacecraft on it.
	All right.
	Bob Bigelow is my guest.
	He's already in space, and he's about to go again shortly from the high desert.
	The both of us, actually, from the high desert.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Indeed, here I am.
	We're dealing with a missing cat, yet he has somehow managed to escape, or he's hiding in a new place that we can't find.
	Listen, everybody, my guest is none other than Bob Bigelow.
	He is a private citizen in space.
	And it's going to be more than just Bob Bigelow in space, eventually.
	There are plans.
	And if you look on the website, you'll see more than just sort of an artist's rendition of those plans.
	You'll see next to the real McCoy.
	And if we could show you the real McCoy.
	And I think Bob may have some photographs on his website of Some of the satellites that he's got in orbit, or if he doesn't, he'll have them there soon, or get them to me and I'll have them there.
	At any rate, in a moment, we'll continue with Bob Bigelow.
	Again, here's Bob Bigelow.
	Bob, so it's SS-18s, and it's kind of nice, I guess, every one you launch is one that is no longer armed with nuclear warheads aimed this away.
	That's right.
	We started with, you know, saying, okay, take about several of those Those warheads off of this one over here, since it's aimed at Las Vegas, will begin there, and there's 7 million tons of explosives.
	Now, is that a joke, or did they actually remove the warheads that were aimed at Vegas?
	It's no joke.
	No joke?
	It's no joke.
	There are 1,100 that are hot, and there are 165 available to the private sector.
	My God.
	Well, thanks for considering Las Vegas first, because in every movie I've ever seen, Las Vegas is the first to go.
	Maybe they just think we'll self-destruct on our own and not waste the nuclear arsenal.
	Maybe.
	At any rate, soon another one is used, soon another one goes into orbit.
	Now, you have plans that go all the way out to the year 2013.
	Now, this is all reasonably within your lifetime and my lifetime, right?
	That's right.
	Hopefully.
	Do you plan to go to space, Bob?
	I do.
	I definitely do.
	What year would you go?
	Oh, I don't know about, I guess, just so I don't wait too long and I can still crawl on board, you know.
	I don't actually have a particular year in mind, but I think it's a function of being prepared and knowing that something is in place in terms of structure where when that time occurs, I'm not leaving something behind that can't be self-sustaining.
	Right.
	Right.
	So you're out to 2013.
	Guess at a year when you might feel comfortable.
	Now the modules start going up.
	Sundance are in 2010, right?
	Correct.
	So you might wait, what, a year and then go?
	We have quite a Quite a program.
	And by the way, I think there are two or three things here to mention.
	One is that we are a member of a group of companies that are all kind of in this together, in this private sector effort, because unless transportation is there, you know, eventually for people, then we're going nowhere.
	So we're very connected to whether there's transportation.
	Sundancer is the exception.
	We are going to launch that spacecraft regardless of whether there's transportation.
	But we are also connected to Space Force, the availability of having dominion and control over Space Force without getting knocked off by DOD or NASA because of some agenda that they have.
	So it's very important for the private sector to have control where if they promise schedules and they promise delivery, All right.
	They have to be able to be the Southwest Airlines of that kind of operation and be able to fulfill those commitments.
	So...
	All right.
	While we're here, let's talk a little bit about NASA because we've got the space shuttle, such as it is.
	But it's got a retirement date, I guess.
	And there's going to be a number of years where the United States, I guess, is not going to launch anything at all.
	We're going to be out of the space business, more or less.
	Is that true?
	That is absolutely true.
	It's an unbelievable situation that we're going to be in.
	But the shuttle fleet, which of course started off being five and now is down to three, Has about 14 missions ahead of it.
	And so it's kind of even not certain whether all 14 can be accomplished by those three shuttles in that length of time.
	But nevertheless, that is the agenda.
	So it's a very high flight rate for them.
	And between when that shuts down in 010, they're all being mothballed.
	Michael Griffin, who's the NASA Administrator, as you know, has said recently that they do not see any way that we will have a transportation system, the Orion system, before 2015.
	So, America will be, in fact, we have appropriated, congressionally, over a billion dollars a year for transportation expenses that will be applicable to those points in time from From 010 to 015 or beyond.
	So from 010 to 015, we're not going to space.
	There's nothing that, we have no vehicles that could get us there.
	That's as far as the federal program is concerned.
	Now there is a caveat to that.
	There are two caveats to that.
	The first caveat is that Congress shoved and pushed to its credit, so we have to give them a little credit.
	Not too much, we don't want to get carried away, but a little credit.
	They shoved and pushed and they forced NASA to embrace the private sector in a transportation program called COTS.
	And that's an alternative transportation program to the lunar program that NASA is trying to implement.
	So they took a sum of money, a little less than 500 million dollars, appropriated over A five-year period, so averaging $100 million per year.
	Now, that's a lot of money, but you've got to keep something in mind here.
	Everything is relative, right?
	So there's $500 million that was awarded to two private companies, and that's out of a sum of money that's going to be at least $90 billion that NASA will have that will be appropriated to NASA over the course of that five years.
	So out of $90 billion, about $475 million was given to the private sector to say, hey, take this money and go do what we need to have done to get a transportation system to the ISS and back in that five-year period of time.
	So the money was actually pretty much divided equally.
	Well, not quite equally, but one company got a little more than the other between those two companies.
	And they are SpaceX and Kistler Rocketplane.
	And they have been in the news a lot because they are trying to succeed, and they have a huge challenge ahead of them.
	Anybody wanting to go to space in the private sector has a monstrous challenge.
	And you sort of outlined the technical part, the money part, and of course, worst of all, the politics of it all.
	You know, you said you thought about it, and there's too many choke points.
	Real point where a massive audience like this could help you out.
	There must be a few points that are more sticky than others.
	It just doesn't seem right.
	If Bob Bigelow or anybody else wants to go to space, and you've demonstrated certainly a capability to do so, and you've got a satellite up there that is functioning, another one that's about to, and they're going to continue to function, and obviously you're going to get up big space.
	As a matter of fact, to give people an idea, when you've got about four or five modules, you know, in 2012 or 2013 or whatever it is, How does the amount of space inside your various modules compare to what the International Space Station will have in its heyday?
	If and when the ISS is completed, the intent is to have 1,100 cubic meters.
	NASA had, a while ago, decided to cut that in half to 550 cubic meters and call it core complete.
	But through various political pressure, I think that that size is going to march more toward the full 1,100 meters maybe in, you know, three, four years or so.
	That kind of is a TBD.
	In our case, each of our modules is over 300 meters, so we could accumulate 1,100, well, we could accumulate 1,200 meters with four modules.
	They're 300 plus meters, so, you know, give you some idea.
	Yeah, big.
	And by the way, our modules are fairly generic.
	You know, our intent, believe it or not, is not necessarily to operate space hotels, but these modules, our intent is to serve different client communities and essentially lease these structures to different kinds of users, and it could be You know, the Hera Hotel Company, or Richard Branson, or the MGM folks, Four Hotels, or Hilton, you know, it could be that.
	But it may also be major corporations that want to use them for laboratory purposes.
	And we also have created a, we're going to make a special announcement in Colorado in April as to a whole new market that basically hasn't been I haven't been kicked around much at all by anybody that we know of, and I'll tell you what it is right now.
	I wasn't going to do this, but I decided, yeah, let's do it.
	We're making a major presentation, as I said, in Colorado, and this is at the Space Foundation Symposium, which is going to be attended by about 7,000 people.
	And we're trying to launch our whole business kind of concept plan, at least major portions of it.
	And one of the major areas of markets that that we think makes a lot of sense is providing what we call hang time for what we call sovereign clients.
	And what that means is there are out there in other countries, including America, about 225 active astronauts.
	Now, That's been the case for a long time.
	For decades.
	That's all.
	That's all there is.
	Now, why isn't there another zero on the end of that?
	You know, why, after all these years, and why are there only 225 and barely hanging on to that?
	And mainly, it's because there haven't been places for them to go, and it's been, it's an expensive activity.
	Can they afford that, is the other question.
	So, the waiting list is huge for them to get on board the ISS, and in fact, I've heard it mentioned many times, if an astronaut has not flown and they're in their 40s, they have a good chance of never flying.
	Just because if you do the math, you know, the ISS is going to expand in 08 its population to 6 people, but right now it's 3.
	And they change shifts every 6 months.
	So it's, you know, six people a year.
	There's one more thing that I remember you said to me that really worried me.
	During those years that the United States may not be flying at all, the Russians will be.
	So the Russians sort of inherit the space station, right?
	Isn't that great?
	I mean, the Americans will have spent, this is really interesting, the Americans will have spent a hundred billion dollars By 010.
	Right.
	After all the launches on the shuttles are done, and all the modules and everything else, they will have spent $100 billion.
	And they have no friggin' way of getting there.
	My God.
	Yeah.
	No way to get there.
	That's right.
	So the only people that could get us there, we'd have to beg a ride on a Russian spacecraft.
	You got it.
	You got it.
	And right now, the Russians have agreed to 2011 to price those seats at $21,800,000.
	to price those seats at $21,800,000.
	And after that, all bets are off.
	Why, Bob?
	We've got ICBMs, right?
	We had at least as many, if not more than the Russians, or at least we had parity of some sort.
	So why aren't you using old US ICBMs instead of Russian ICBMs?
	Excellent question.
	Excellent question.
	Well, you know what the answer was?
	That, because the SALT II treaties demanded that we destroy X number, both countries, destroy X number of missiles per year and so on.
	Oh, yes.
	Take them off the market, so to speak.
	Well, the American rocket companies, politics lobbied against that, because what happened is, those less expensive rockets now become, they get on the market, and in theory they take the place of a much more expensive system.
	So, you wouldn't want.
	I mean, you know, if you're looking at this from Boeing's standpoint and Lockheed's standpoint, you're going to say, hey, wait a minute.
	Let's take bulldozers and drive over these things.
	But I thought the American taxpayers owned these.
	Sort of.
	Well, yeah, but the other ones have to be manufactured, don't they, to replace them.
	And what will happen is anything that's available for launching potentially can take market share away from the market, away from other Other systems that can be used.
	Well, then that had to be a lobbying effort, really, on the part of the aerospace people.
	Well, yes.
	Right?
	Of course.
	Of course.
	Yes.
	Yes, if you're selling missiles, you do not want government missiles on the black market for sale at a tenth of the cost.
	Well, no, but, you know, through some sort of procedure, you could determine that they're going to a good use, for example, what you're doing.
	Well, yeah, but this isn't a, you know, business is business, and if you're building missiles and making those, it's not philanthropy that you're into.
	You're into trying to maintain your market share.
	You're trying to make sure that there aren't other sources of missiles that are going to Yeah, but that's only because the Russians don't have the money.
	You see, necessity is the mother of invention.
	I mean, the Russians are not wasting money.
	They're turning these missiles into, turning them over virtually to the private sector,
	in other words, to you, selling them to you or whatever, the launch capability.
	Yeah, but that's only because the Russians don't have the money.
	You see, necessity is the mother of invention.
	And the fact is, since they don't have the money, they were forced to be judicious and
	careful and innovative in their whole thought process.
	Over here, we have a lot of money.
	We have more than... And so we just crushed them?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Oh my God.
	That must be an awfully frustrating, awfully frustrating thing for you.
	I mean, obviously you would want to do business with your own country if you could.
	Yep.
	In fact, we did.
	We contracted with With a small aerospace company that is in the process of trying to perfect a new rocket.
	And they were supposed to have that ready, and they've had some difficulties, and they're still working at it.
	And I think they will eventually succeed, but it really played hell with our schedule, so we couldn't just hang around and hang around and hang around.
	I understand.
	It's just sad.
	Yeah, it is.
	It really is.
	And, you know, on the one hand, we don't have enough money to go back to the moon, we don't have enough money to go to Mars, but we've got enough money to crush missiles, and then have somebody like you have to go to the Russians and buy theirs.
	Well, actually going back to the moon is a huge financial problem, and in fact, to put this in perspective for you, to show you just how distant, no pun intended, the moon is from a financial standpoint, think of it this way.
	At the heyday, at the peak of the Lunar Initiative back in the 60s, at one point in time, in one year, the United States spent 5% of its budget.
	Now, we're at a $3 trillion budget now.
	That's $150 billion.
	Right.
	In one year, we're talking about here.
	One year.
	In one year, at the peak of that initiative, it was 5% of the budget at that point in time.
	Okay, now if you fast forward here to this point in time, that 5% would be $150 billion because you now have a $3 trillion budget, okay?
	So it'd be $150 billion.
	Well, NASA's new 07-08 budget is the same as last year, $16.2 billion.
	Wow.
	And oh, by the way, half of that budget is spent for the Shuttle, to maintain the Shuttle and the ISS.
	So that's... Yeah, right.
	And so Bush said, go forward and cast your bread on the waters and multiply on your own here because we're not giving you any new money.
	You're going to go to the moon based on a cannibalization of the shuttle and ISS programs after O-10.
	You're going to shut them down, you're going to phase them out, and those dollars, that half of the annual budget, you're now going to allocate toward the moon.
	Oh my God.
	Yeah, so that's why politics is up at the top of your list.
	Oh boy, is it?
	Yeah.
	And you do have an office in Washington that, I guess, addresses the appropriate agencies and spends all its time trying to get permits for you and that sort of thing?
	All of the time, yes.
	It is a horrendous challenge.
	Okay.
	All right, hold tight, Bob.
	Bob Bigelow is my guest.
	He's not talking about going to space.
	He's in space.
	And the plans are just absolutely incredible.
	They don't stop at 2012, by the way, as the Mayan calendar does.
	They go straight on to 2016.
	That would be the sixth standard big module from the high desert.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Indeed, here I am.
	Bob Bigelow is my guest, and his company, Bigelow Aerospace, is already there, and the plans they have would just blow your mind.
	If you want to take a look, go to coast2coastam.com, and the photographs that Aaron and I took when we were at Bigelow Aerospace will convince you of the extremely serious, no-fooling-around effort this man is making.
	We'll be right back.
	Alright, back again with Bob Bigelow.
	Bob, welcome back.
	Thank you.
	Actually, all of this aerospace business now is new.
	Prior to aerospace, you were into all kinds of paranormal subjects, very deeply into the paranormal, and I know you financed many, many scientists that I've interviewed on the air over the years.
	And I guess, in some ways, one sort of led into the other, and in fact kind of meshes, or may mesh, with the other.
	Is that so?
	Uh, well yeah, I think that's kind of fair to say.
	I think so.
	A lot of my listeners, you know, they follow ufology very closely, Bob.
	And obviously, here you are, a private citizen with a spacecraft in orbit, another one about to be more on the way.
	You're going to have a lot of cameras in space.
	You're going to have a lot of ability to look around, as it were, and view unfiltered Untampered, let's see, how am I trying to put this?
	You're going to have a lot of footage, Bob, that didn't go through anybody's filter.
	Are you going to be looking?
	Well, you know, one of the things that characterizes the UFO enigma and that fabulously interesting topic Is that it is in command of its behavior and it really is selective as to when it wants to expose or where and to whom and the timing.
	Exactly.
	And it is always a challenge to try to ever get a replication of an exposure and have a second performance.
	Those kinds of things are relatively unique.
	And so it's a catch-as-catch-can kind of thing.
	And obviously, you know, our cameras are looking back at the Earth and as we show those scenes on our website.
	We also have a lot of cameras, however, that are looking back on the spacecraft itself to monitor the behavior of the spacecraft, what is going on.
	And of course, a lot of those cameras are interior as well.
	The majority, though, I think are probably exterior located.
	But if, yeah, if you were to say, look, would you promise us that if you capture something
	looking in the face of one of those lenses that you'll identify it as such?
	You're damn right we will.
	Absolutely.
	In addition to that, aside from a possible little gray face or something like that, the STS cameras have on occasion caught things that are very, very curious.
	I mean, things that just almost can't be.
	They've caught objects apparently shooting at other objects.
	They've caught all kinds of things, Bob.
	Correct.
	And you're going to have cameras focused in the same area.
	So if you catch something like that, you'll make that available, won't you?
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	If we see something crossing in a certain direction that makes a right angle turn, that is anomalous.
	Yeah, it sure is.
	I'm sure that you've seen some of the STS footage of things just like that, haven't you?
	Yes, yes.
	And they explained it away as ice crystals that were blown off prop systems on board.
	Yes, I know.
	From the tone of your voice, I take it you didn't fully buy that yourself?
	No, not based on a couple of those that I've seen.
	I think that's something else.
	Okay.
	Is it reasonable, Bob, in your mind, that if there was another intelligence out there, since we set off the first above ground test, that they would have been watching us?
	That they would be monitoring us?
	And therefore, something in low Earth orbit, or any kind of orbit, might well get a look at something.
	Yeah, I think, you know, you have kind of two thoughts that you've just expressed at the same time, and one suggests that the awareness of this phenomena occurred at the time that we first started detonating nuclear devices.
	Yes, sir.
	And I could argue that maybe it has been around much longer than that, but then Yeah, I think, you know, you have a number of astronauts that have come back and reported things that they have seen, both terrestrially, incidentally, as well as airborne.
	Oh, that's absolutely true, of course.
	And it's kind of under-reported, but yes, many astronauts have, quite a few astronauts, have seen something, something.
	So it's entirely possible that in this venture, I mean it is after all going where very few people, you just documented it yourself, have gone.
	And so, I don't know, I've always had this theory that maybe since the beginning of man, Bob, they've been watching us or been keeping tabs on us, but certainly when we entered the element 92 age, we would have really captured their more intent observation of us, I would think.
	Well, I think it would be interesting to be an objective observer of the human species and ponder the progress of the technological achievements at the same time that you're hoping that, gee, the spiritual maturity is keeping pace.
	And what happens when it never does?
	I always wonder, are we the Klingons?
	Yeah, are we the Klingons?
	We may be.
	We're not all that well behaved at the moment.
	You and I talked to some degree, Bob, about the current ecological situation on our planet.
	It's not the very best.
	If you look at the way it's headed, it's not headed in a particularly good direction.
	I just watched Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth and it scared the hell out of me.
	It's so well done, yeah.
	So well done, yes.
	There are irrefutable truths that he presented in that.
	No matter how you feel about Al Gore, and I know a lot of people hate his guts, a lot of those things are just irrefutable truths.
	That's all there is to it.
	I mean, he had pictures.
	They were undeniable.
	What's going on on our planet is undeniable.
	And eventually, we're going to need more real estate.
	Perhaps sooner than later.
	Now, the only close real estate right now that's worth two hoots, or might be worth two hoots, would be Mars.
	Correct.
	Is that fair to say?
	I mean, we have the ability to get to Mars, don't we?
	It is.
	Well, we do, and we have had, even through crude chemical systems, they work, and there are alternative Systems underway, being developed that can significantly reduce the time of each way, travel.
	So, I have a friend, in fact, that's an astronaut that has been working on an ion propulsion system for a long time.
	It appears now that after all these years, he's on more solid footing and making progress.
	And he tells me that he expects that transition time from Earth to Mars to be maybe as short as a month and a half under his type of propulsion.
	Of course, Mars has, you know, it's not a perfectly circular orbit and so the deviation is substantial.
	You need to time it when it's closest to Earth and it can be as close as maybe 80 million miles and as far away as 130 some million miles.
	In fact, I think at one point here a few years ago, it was in about the 65 million mile, which was a rare, very rare proximity to Earth, but obviously that shortens your travel time.
	Okay, well you said something earlier.
	That caught my attention, and you were laughing when you said it, but you said it would be great, you know, just great if the Chinese decided they were going to go to Mars, because that would get us going again.
	We couldn't possibly let the Chinese get to Mars and lay down whatever claims they could lay down, or even just the claim of being there first, without getting into a race with them, and then we'd somehow find the money, wouldn't we?
	Well, we would, because, first of all, you wouldn't start World War III over that kind of an event.
	It's not life-threatening.
	It's not threatening any other sovereign country.
	Trade and commerce would proceed merrily on its way, so nobody is getting harmed in the process physically.
	You wouldn't start a war over that.
	Also, there is so much ambiguity about the 1967 Space Treaty that we mentioned earlier that a lot of folks feel.
	That it just doesn't hold water anymore.
	India is declaring a space program and other countries, even Britain has, I mean, a lunar program.
	India intends to package, send a package to the moon.
	And Russia and China have now partnered in that regard.
	Even Germany?
	Even Germany, even England.
	Yes, a number of countries have.
	So I think, I think, you know, the 67 Treaty probably is going to be interpreted quite differently through application.
	So eventually we're going to need, I mean all the best theoretical physicists that I've talked to have said The only way the human race ultimately is going to survive is to find a new home.
	It's going to have to find more real estate.
	And right now, Mars is the only thing within thinkable reach, really.
	So, what would get us there?
	Well, a race would get us there.
	Short of that, why are we not doing it, Bob?
	Well, business could get us there too.
	A race is one One approach, but actually there are probably business concepts that could also provide that kind of financial support and emphasis to make that happen.
	Well, alright, explain to me what business model you could imagine that would get us to Mars?
	Well, I think if you came to a point in time Where the perception was that you could adequately mount an expedition to Mars and you could have essentially a convoy of structures.
	And as a precursor to that you'd already deployed along the way various depots, you know, so that you can stop off and replenish your supply of candy bars and what not.
	And so you've done that and maybe you've also deployed to the surface of Mars as You know, some others have suggested, Zubrin and others, that you might want to do that.
	And I think the Moon is a necessary precursor to this, because you learn a lot about how to behave in hostile environments, and the Moon is a good place to start that.
	It's close to home, and it is a hostile environment, and Mars is A little less hostile, but it's also tricky because it has... Yeah, I was going to ask about that.
	It is a little less hostile than the Moon, right?
	Yeah, but it's tricky because it has winds, you know, and those winds are an interesting feature to have to deal with with structures.
	I interviewed not long ago somebody from NASA and they were praising the winds, particularly these whirlwinds that would come along, even though they don't have the same pressure gradients that our winds do.
	They were enough to clean off the solar panels on the little bugs we've got crawling around up there.
	Well, yeah, but they've been known to click along at 300 miles an hour, and of course that actually isn't 300 Earth miles in the sense of actual power because of the atmosphere change, but it is equivalent to 100 miles an hour here.
	How would you like to have... You've got some habitat sitting out there, and you want to make sure that thing is really nailed down, because 100 miles an hour force is huge.
	And of course, if you have solar field out there with your solar arrays, I think it would do more than clean off the dust off your solar arrays.
	So you probably want to go to RTGs, radioisotopic thermonuclear generators, which would be the practical power source to have.
	And they're fairly benign.
	They're not something that is going to cause a fissionable reaction.
	And that's the kind of power that you probably want.
	Bob, could the space shuttle go to the moon?
	No.
	No?
	No.
	As a matter of fact, they have difficulty launching from the Cape on one of the shuttles,
	I'm not sure if it's Atlantis or Discovery, a full payload because the inclination of
	the station is so difficult to get to, it can barely get to that.
	And the reason it's there is because the first modules, it's at a 64 degree inclination, that's because the first modules to the station were launched from Baikonur in Russia.
	And, you know, instead of the Cape.
	And had they been launched from the Cape, well, then they would have been in probably a 28 degree orbit and been much easier to get to.
	So the shuttle fleet is designed only for low Earth orbit, for LEO operations, and not really anything very altitude intense at that.
	I heard it suggested by someone somewhere that once you were in low Earth orbit, you were not that far from the Moon in some respects.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	The gravity well is what they were referring to, and that is that once you can get to Leo, you're halfway to anywhere.
	And that's because the gravity, you know, that field is so important, it takes so much energy with conventional means, since we don't have levitating capabilities yet.
	It takes a lot of energy just to get to LEO.
	And then, you know, essentially, you're on your way.
	All right.
	Well, you're obviously launching with conventional means, the SS-18.
	Now, I'm sure that you have looked into every possible propulsion system That you could get your hands on or that anybody imagined or mentioned or whispered about.
	And there is nothing out there right now, is there, Bob?
	Except what we've got, except the heavy power way to get to orbit.
	Well, what you know or what you speculate about and what's actually there that you can get your hands on easily are very different things.
	And so you go where the line of least resistance is, right?
	And you go with systems that are well understood, that are available, that are economical, and yada yada yada.
	So, you know, that's the way you approach things.
	And you also want, you know, there are a lot of different things that are Offered up as even rather conventional, but new technologies that are whiz-bang situations, you know, self-healing membranes and shape-shifting structures and so forth.
	And they have now found their way into the lexicon of our language and into the actual application of space science, wherein we used to just read about those in the UFO books 20-30 years ago.
	You know, but so anyway, that aside, so even in those kinds of things, you want to be careful that you don't put them in the path of really a single fault tolerant situation.
	I mean, you don't, you want to be very, very careful when life is at stake.
	Oh, yes, indeed.
	And let's talk about life for a second.
	On your first spacecraft, you launched I've got pictures, as a matter of fact, I think of some of the, was it beetles?
	Yeah, yeah, little old Madagascar hissing beetles.
	And the little buggers survived a complete vacuum in our test.
	We tested a lot of little critters because we didn't know what to expect.
	And those things survived after being in a vacuum something like an hour, or maybe it was even two hours, an unbelievable time.
	I forget what I was told exactly, but something in the order of an hour to two hours.
	Of course, they hauled them out, and their legs up, belly up, and, oh, OK, another group didn't make it.
	Well, they came back.
	They came back.
	So they have the gold star seal of approval for flight.
	How can that be?
	I mean, do you understand?
	I don't know.
	No.
	No, I have no clue, Art.
	I have no idea.
	I don't know how anything could stand a complete lack of air, a complete decompression for an hour and then live and come back.
	Well, nothing else did that we tested.
	I have no clue.
	No clue.
	But we kind of threw these things together on that Genesis 1 and so we scrambled around and put some Mexican jumping beans in there and these beetles and said, OK guys, you're off.
	Okay, I guess there's going to be a progression of higher life forms that are going to be going on future spacecraft, topped off I suppose with a human, and then many humans.
	Alright, Bob Bigelow is my guest and we'll be back in just a very few moments.
	I am a creature of the night, there's no question about that.
	Good evening, good morning everybody, as it were.
	We do our best work here in the nighttime.
	My guest, probably not usually up this late, is Bob Bigelow.
	He'll be back in a moment.
	Let me give you a couple of pieces, or me a couple of pieces of good news.
	The lost cat, Yeti, is found next door, screaming like a banshee.
	And so he's back in custody at the moment.
	Now, one other thing, finally, we got the Art Bell's Pizza Punch website back up again, so those of you, gazillions of you, who didn't get to see it because it crashed in about nine seconds, you might want to give it another try now.
	It's Artbell's pizza, P-U-N-C-H dot com.
	Go take a look.
	It's incredible stuff, and I'm going to be looking to many of you for taste testing, as it were.
	We'll be right back.
	Incidentally, we have an ability for you to ask questions of our guest while he's actually doing the interview.
	You can just go up to the website www.coasttocoastam.com and fast blast us a question.
	Bob, Michael in Jasper, Alabama asks whether we have access, meaning we, the public, are you going to give access to any of the onboard cameras, particularly the ones focused back toward Earth?
	Are you going to stream any of that?
	On Genesis 2?
	Well, on any of them, for that matter.
	Well, Genesis 2 has a public program.
	It's the only spacecraft of our Pathfinder group that will have that, and it's the Fly Yourself program.
	So we have interior cameras that are going to be following all the things floating around inside that spacecraft, for one thing, that the public has paid to see.
	They've paid to have their items flown.
	And then they're paying to actually have them captured on film, and we will freeze-frame those and then put them on our website so people can see their own stuff.
	If we fail to do that, we return all their money.
	Really?
	Yeah, it's a money-back guarantee.
	If we can't do that, if we can't capture everyone's item, or anybody's item, any particular item in there that we can't identify clearly and put it on our website, then Everybody gets their money back for those items that we can't find, that we can't grab the pictures on.
	So there are those cameras.
	Then there are cameras outside that we are trying two projection systems, just for the heck of it, that broadcast messages perhaps on the hull of the spacecraft outside, you know?
	Really?
	Yeah.
	So we have two, just kind of as a second one as a backup situation.
	And we have cameras that will be looking at those projections, and we have some prescribed pre-canned messages in case our command and control of those runs amok.
	But if the command and control works, then in theory, we might be able to execute a, you know, virtually, a very large menu of communications on the outside of that spacecraft.
	Okay.
	So, yes, the answer is there will be public involvement with the cameras.
	Correct.
	Correct.
	Ralph in Cerritos, California asks, has the U.S.
	government at any point ever asked you to censor any possible footage that you might get in space?
	No, not as of this time.
	How would you react to such a request?
	Well, it would have to be an awfully good reason.
	I mean, you know, we are Americans and we feel as patriotic as the next guy, but we would have to really be convinced that such a demand, it would have to get into the context of not just probably a request, but an actual demand.
	We have already experienced something In a different kind of way, in a different context.
	Can you talk about it?
	Well, only in a circumspect kind of way.
	The result of exposing something would have violated a promise and agreement that we had With some other folks, and we refused to do that.
	It wasn't something that, in our judgment, was warranted.
	It was something that violated our ethics, it violated our principles of contracts, and it violated our keeping our word.
	In the context in which we were given this, in terms of a request, it wasn't a demand.
	In a request, and we turn the request down.
	All right, well obviously you can't talk any more about that, so I won't push any further.
	Chris in Stewartstown, New Hampshire asks, when you get human beings up there, the space station of course has an escape capability.
	What would your modulized station have to get people down in an emergency?
	Well, the same capsules that are used to transport people back and forth are also the lifeboats, and so when Sundancer flies in O-10, the second half of O-10, it will go through a space trial, just like you would a sea trial for a time, but that would be an unoccupied space trial.
	Then there would come a time when there would be occupancy, and that would necessitate having a transportation mechanism.
	At that point, that vessel becomes the lifeboat for those folks and any other folks that are subsequently visiting that particular module or other modules getting to it are all able to, we would always have enough seats and enough capsules to bring everyone back home.
	Steve in Miami, Florida.
	Now, you don't have to answer all of this.
	You might not be able to.
	What kind of metals are used mostly on your spacecraft?
	Do you custom manufacture your own machinery and or robotics used in the making of parts?
	We do a combination of things.
	We are general contractors and so we execute a lot of contracts where we subcontract out all kinds of hardware, all kinds of fabrication and manufacturing of items.
	But we also do that in-house as well.
	The usual material that we use for our standard materials is aluminum.
	Composites provide an opportunity, but they're also not user-friendly in some respects.
	So you look at a combination of the practicality of Whatever the assignment of the emission is on a particular piece of hardware, you have always multiple choices.
	I mean, you can go to titanium and there are, oh gosh, six or eight, ten different kinds of aluminum and alloys that you can use.
	And some are more difficult to get in large quantities, so it becomes a quantity problem.
	It can be a cost problem and a machining problem.
	The machining time on titanium is far longer than it would be on aluminum ingots and so forth. So each item is a little
	different as to what its criteria might be and then common sense drives the decision.
	What are the odds, Bob?
	You're about to launch, you're going to launch next month.
	There must be somebody who tells you what the odds are that you're going to have a successful launch versus, you know, some trouble.
	Well, yeah, you can, you know, the NEPR, as far as the launch of the rocket, you know, the transportation device, those have flown, gosh, a huge number of times.
	And they have not had that many failures.
	You can count them on one hand, but they've flown well over a hundred times, I believe, and so the odds are in your favor in that respect that you're going to have a successful launch.
	Now, as far as our spacecraft is concerned, we... Before you go on, I'm very happy for you, but I'm not so happy to hear the SS-18 is that reliable.
	Right.
	Understandably.
	Understandably.
	But, you know, of course, any nation is going to have something that they feel they can count on in terms of a national crisis.
	So it's kind of expected that... So it is a very high... It is more reliable than the... I think it's more reliable than the shuttle is.
	So, they would give you a 1 in X number of failures, right?
	Yeah, I think they're somewhere around 98.5%.
	As I recall, I believe that's about where they are.
	That's quite good.
	Yeah.
	Do you insure your spacecraft?
	We do not.
	You might say we're self-insured.
	So, if you were to lose a spacecraft, that would Can you give us a ballpark figure?
	I mean, how expensive are these?
	Or can you not talk of it?
	I really can't give a definitive answer on that, but they are expensive.
	We're prepared, if necessary, to lose spacecraft.
	You know, when you get into something, you have to look at the worst case.
	And so we are prepared.
	The spacecraft costs a lot, and so does the launch.
	And as we migrate up into larger systems, like propulsion buses and rockets that are larger than the Nepper,
	and that's the next size, you know, up for a Sundancer is a rocket that can carry 20,000 pounds or so.
	And those systems are much more expensive.
	By the way, for the ham radio operators out there, you may recall in a previous interview,
	I asked Bob if he could put a ham repeater on one of those spacecraft,
	and by God, you tried, right?
	We did try, we did try, and we got the answer back was that, oh, you're going to have to be licensed to do that.
	You know, we said, well, wait a minute, it's only a target, you know, we're not going to be broadcasting or anything like that.
	Well, they didn't care, so that's what we were confronted with.
	Which is sort of typical of what you're confronted with in all kinds of areas.
	In other words, there is so much paperwork, there is so much bureaucracy to make your way through to get this done, to get something in space, it's unbelievable.
	It really is.
	It really is, Art.
	It's so huge.
	And that's one of the reasons it's nice not to To have to take government money, because there are not only so many strings attached, but just the paperwork alone, and the imposition of specifications on you.
	You know, you have a fair idea of what you want to do, and all kinds of reasons why you want to do these things, but if somebody else is writing that check, and it's the United States government, or probably any government, they're going to have you dance to all kinds of music.
	And that spells delay in your schedule, and it really spells All right.
	Other than the hotel business, for example, Bob, and I know you've been in some preliminary discussions with some hotel chains, and I don't know how much more you can say about that, but you have been.
	Other than that, in terms of a business model, if you had these habitable Modules up there now, Bob, would there be enough from the private sector to sustain, to financially sustain what you're doing?
	We think so.
	And what we're trying to do is go from a position of where space complexes are sort of a novelty To where they become a necessity.
	And we think we have a handle on various business approaches to where they can evolve into absolute necessities.
	Like, you know, what your cell phone and what your TV relies on are satellite transmissions.
	And those are necessities.
	Yes.
	Today the planet could not do without a huge global constellations of satellites.
	So they are necessities.
	And we think that we have Some plans and ideas that make a lot of sense, perhaps, that can evolve these from a novelty kind of status, in a sense.
	I mean, if you talk about tourism, that is a novelty kind of category.
	But we think we can get them to where they need to be a necessity.
	And once they can reach that position, oh my gosh.
	And we're actually more concerned, Art, that we have, frankly, we are our biggest concern Rightly or wrongly, is when and where is the transportation going to come from?
	And are we going to have enough spaceports to handle the volume?
	Because in our first year of operation, we're looking at 13 flights that first year.
	And nobody's ever flown anywhere near that many times to LEO with a crew of people before.
	That's over one a month.
	Is there a best place to launch from?
	Theoretically, yeah, you want to fly, you know, west to east in the rotation, same direction rotation of the Earth, and you want to fly in an equatorial belt because the Earth is slightly bowed at the center, so the rotation speed is higher there than it is at the North Pole.
	And so, for starters, you would like that.
	Now, from a practical standpoint, you need to be where markets are.
	You need to be where customers can get to you easily.
	And you know, I'm a businessman.
	I've had a lot of different businesses over the years.
	I've been involved in banking and general contracting and construction and apartment development and so forth is basically what we've been for gobs of years.
	And so we're customer driven.
	We understand that.
	And so that's why part of our plan, our program, is that people don't have to write
	checks to buy these things.
	They can rent them. They can lease them.
	They can lease them for fractions of volume, for half the volume, if they don't want a whole volume, and
	they can lease them for fractions of time, down to 30 days if they want to.
	Well, what are the things that you can do in orbit that are financially viable?
	I mean, I hear people talking about growing crystals, but I really don't know, Bob, what are the financially rewarding reasons to be in low-Earth orbit?
	Well, if you are getting back to our two main categories of sovereign clients, if you are Nation, and you have an astronaut corps, you need some place for those people to go, and maybe you're a country that would like to have a space agency and like to have a corps, but why do that if there's nowhere to go?
	So, that's a fairly sizable dynamic that we might be able to grow the astronaut community from 225 to maybe 500 to 1,000 to 2,000.
	If the price is right, And if they have somewhere to go, and they have reliable scheduled transportation, I think there's a huge business waiting for it to be successful there.
	And the other is, in the sense of prime clients, international corporations, let's just take the computer chip people, or pharma people, pharmaceutical people, or medical clients, if one or two companies decide to put a module to use as a laboratory, and we know that Weird things happen in that environment, in terms for organic and non-organic substances, that very interesting properties occur.
	And you can get into nanotechnologies much more easily in that venue than you can on terrestrial circumstances.
	So, let's suppose you saw your competitor put a laboratory together, and you're a wealthy company.
	And so the question kind of is then, When the first person starts to do that, how long does it take for the others to stand back and sit there and wait before they decide?
	Well, because obviously the first company is not going to be talking a lot about their successes or failures about what's going on board.
	And they're certainly not going to be broadcasting good news, you know, necessarily right away.
	So they're going to try to get things into the marketplace.
	So I think that we are talking Targeting maybe the top 20 companies in about eight different theaters of the semiconductor world and the biotech world, pharmaceutical world, and there's a number of different communities like that.
	And even something as prosaic as the automobile world, you know, they have sophisticated laboratories of their own also.
	So you might even have Toyota or somebody who would want to use these facilities.
	Are these people now able to go to NASA or able to go to anybody else if they want to get into space for a reason?
	Can they, you know, lay down a check and get there?
	No.
	No?
	No, they can't.
	NASA's on a prescription to finish up the space station then shut the fleet down so there are no payloads for For life sciences has been severely cut, and for other kinds of experiments has severely been curtailed.
	Okay, so, yes, and then in 2010, we can't get to space, so we hand the keys to the space station to the Russians.
	Isn't that amazing?
	Isn't that amazing?
	Amazing is one word, there would be another.
	I'm Art Bell, we'll be right back.
	Well, all right.
	Bob Bigelow is my guest.
	Bigelow Aerospace.
	They've got one satellite in orbit right now, another about to be launched.
	Plans that go through 2016 and include something that ultimately is probably going to be bigger than the International Space Station.
	It's going to really be big.
	And if you want to get an idea of how big, Just go up to the website, coast2coastam.com, and look at a series of photographs, and I took quite a number of photographs, of essentially what will be up there.
	It is, at the very least, eye-opening.
	Bob Bigelow, back in a moment.
	Only here is an interesting question that just popped in my own head.
	With regard to the modules that you're going to have up there, eventually there's going to be a big emergency in space.
	It's going to be at the ISS or it's going to be somewhere.
	And I wonder if your modules would have docking facilities that would be compatible with either the standard US or Russian spacecraft.
	Yes, that's a good question.
	Each module's going to, hopefully, the United States is going to have its own docking adapter system.
	At the present time, it does not.
	We use exclusively Russian systems.
	The APAS systems and the probe and cone are Russian systems.
	But there is something underway for this country, and what we would do is outfit each module At each end, for each airlock, there would be docking adapters that would accommodate more than one type.
	And that's presuming that, or is assuming that, we would have access to that kind of traffic.
	That, indeed, if we were to use a Russian docking adapter, that presumably we had Uh, you know, some, some relationship there for that kind of traffic provision.
	And same thing with the, with the American system.
	Now you also have to sort of define what is, what is the crisis?
	Because there are many kinds of crises that may not require or would not necessitate actually Removing people from the complex and sending them back to Earth.
	Now, of course, this is way off the wall, but supposing you had your modules up there and there was a crisis, would you expect help from NASA?
	In that kind of situation, again it gets back to the kind of crisis that we're talking about.
	Let's suppose we have a time of the essence crisis.
	Let's put a parameter that time is essential.
	Let's put that parameter on there.
	Now, if time is essential, there may be no time to respond with a launch and acquiring the target.
	Usually it takes you 24 hours to acquire the target.
	It might be done earlier, quicker than that.
	You may have a 48-hour window where that's usually the prescription for the Russians and the Americans where you rendezvous and dock within a 48-hour period.
	So, it might be anywhere within a 16 to 40-hour period.
	So, it depends on how urgent that crisis is.
	Let's suppose it's a medical crisis.
	Let's suppose somebody is in need of an appendectomy and now you've got to do some invasive surgery.
	And this is kind of interesting because there's another whole field out there that we haven't talked about yet tonight which is informational with regard to removing organs, removing things without having extensive invasions of tissue and only in a small incision.
	And yet being able to extract a lot of stuff.
	So that needs to be performed now.
	That can't wait.
	So you need to have the medical facilities and the first aid capabilities, so to speak, that empower you to do that.
	Because in LEO, let's suppose you're on the moon.
	Let's suppose you're halfway to Mars and you have these medical emergencies.
	So there's various kinds of preparations that need to be made.
	With a surgical facility on board, with recovery area on board, and you might have, on a long duration mission, or even on the moon, you would want to have a complete clinic available for that.
	Because you just can't turn around and go back, you know?
	So, you've got to have kind of the attitude that, hey, maybe it's like being 5,000 feet underwater.
	You're on your own, in a sense, and you better be pretty well self-contained.
	I guess so.
	Grover in Tulare, California asks an interesting question.
	He says that what you described, allowing other countries, for example, to have astronauts on your station, makes you sound a little bit like a space mercenary.
	Is that too harsh?
	I don't know quite what that means.
	Well, in other words, space for hire.
	In other words, you're just kind of a mercenary there, in the sense that you're allowing your station to be used for those who can afford to use it and want to get their countries into space.
	Well, it would... I kind of don't... really can't see what the...
	Where the direction of that is particularly.
	Let's suppose that would be perhaps no different than, you know, in this country, we do red flag, blue flag exercises with our Air Force.
	Right.
	And we have for decades and decades and decades had a variety of foreign Air Force pilots fly out here at Nellis, you know, at the Air Force Gunnery Range.
	And this happens at all kinds of other places around the country as well.
	And so training facilities are really important.
	They're hard to come by.
	And the United States has been the host to umpteen, countless number of pilots from other countries in that regard.
	And these are countries that are friends of ours.
	These are countries that the United States looks upon as folks that certainly we look upon them as satisfactory from a standpoint of selling them military aircraft.
	Which Northrop Grumman and other companies certainly have done for many years.
	So in addition to that, we also look at them as friendly forces in terms of battle and having them be prepared and so on.
	And they're all part of usually the NATO forces, you know, that's all kind of a family, the NATO family.
	And so in that regard, we kind of look upon these complexes in the same way.
	that why not use these for training facilities, which they can't get that kind of location
	anywhere else.
	I mean, you can go through all the centrifuge trials you want to and so forth and neutral
	buoyancy tank experiences, but nothing, nothing, nothing comes close to the real deal.
	And there's only one place you can get that.
	And so we think, hey, you know, let's go to the same countries that the United States
	already is predisposed to for a variety of reasons for, for NATO alliances and ISS flights
	and say, look, hey, we're here, you know, and we're here to serve you.
	Thank you.
	Okay, Stephen in Vista, California then described it a little differently.
	Maybe this is easier.
	Instead of leasing, it sounds like these will be essentially space timeshares.
	Yeah, that's not too far.
	We actually have two different situations.
	There are modules that are leased for various kinds of time, like a timeshare, and various kinds of volume.
	And then there are modules that are given freely to the Hangtime Sovereign Client users, the astronauts.
	And I say free in the sense that those are not leased.
	These are two separate users entirely.
	You would not find hang time users on a leased module that is leased by a prime client exclusively for them.
	But you may find hang timers there together with different nationalities, and they're on a complex that's dedicated to that particular mission, to satisfying the needs of those hang time astronauts.
	And they are charged a fee based on the transportation cost and the time of duration on board that complex.
	And actually, the video that we have on their website is a little misleading.
	Our intent really is to have, as early as possible, three separate complexes rather than having one all ganged together.
	And the reason for that is it's derived from two directions.
	One is that there are sensitive A number of sensitive activities that a prime client might want to do without having a lot of disturbances, a lot of docking and undocking and a lot of, you know, perturbations on board that complex.
	And also, the second reason, it might need to be in a different orbit of inclination to make it more accessible for the traffic provider, for the transportation provider.
	You know?
	So we talked earlier about the 64 degree inclination and the 28 degree inclination and that therefore
	you might want to have several complexes in different geographical, so to speak, locations.
	Alright, circling back to another item, when they told you with regard to amateur radio,
	ham radio, that you would have to have a license, I wonder Bob, if any licensed amateur, I'm
	an advanced class, W6OBB, it may well be that if I were involved or any licensed amateur
	were involved, that would be what they're talking about and it might simply take an
	application by a licensed amateur to do it.
	Or maybe if it's in space, there's some further license that I don't understand involved.
	That is possible.
	Now, you are into territory that I don't understand, so that may very well be possible.
	And what we should do then is hook you up with any one of the three program managers we have.
	We have Eric Hackenstadt, who's the program manager for Sundancer, and we have Jay Ingham, Dan, who's the, or the program, Dan Cohen for the program managers of Genesis 2 and for Galaxy, and Galaxy probably is the one, see right now, it's too late for GT.
	Oh, I know, I know, but Galaxy in 2008, maybe not so late.
	Maybe not so late at all for that one, and what we do is, if we hook you up with any of those three guys, we could maybe make it happen if what you're Suggesting here by using you as the venue for this, maybe you could make it happen.
	I would be happy to become involved.
	Have them contact me and we'll look into it, Bob.
	I'd love to see Something Parameter Radio get up there.
	Okay.
	And it would be quite a public kind of thing.
	I think it'd be good.
	The more you can get the public involved.
	And again, let's come back one more time to this.
	Let me try one more time.
	I know there are a lot of choke points here, but there's got to be somebody, some agency that the public could contact and in some way help you out and help you through some of this mess that you're constantly going through.
	Did you check with your Washington office?
	Did they have any ideas?
	The Washington office response would be to contact the Department of State and, well actually, it would be to contact Congress and put pressure on the Space and Science Committees of Congress to probably transfer back The authorities over ITAR to the Department of Commerce, where they were once upon a time.
	And once upon a time, they were more user-friendly, so I'm told, when they were in, when they resided in the Department of Commerce versus the Department of State, because the Department of Commerce cared a little bit more about commerce, of actual commerce.
	Yeah, actual commerce.
	You know, they kind of felt that, hey, there's a connection between Yes, indeed.
	All right.
	Well, maybe some in the audience can certainly help out with that.
	Listen, a few weeks ago now, I had George Knapp and Colm Culloher on, and we did a show on the Skinwalker Ranch, which you own.
	Yes.
	I wonder if you can give us any late updates on the Skinwalker Ranch.
	We've been kind of going through a UFO flap over the last months since the O'Hare Airport incident.
	Right.
	And it's been pretty wild, Bob.
	Do you have any comments on that and any update on the ranch?
	Oh, well, you know, I've been, I still am involved in investigations, not in the intensity that I was in the 1990s in the late 80s and prior to when I just had to jump in on
	the space subject.
	But, well, okay, going to the ranch.
	Yeah, we had a period of time where there was a lull in that ranch activity
	and that lasted for, oh gosh, perhaps, A year and a half or two years.
	I don't recall exactly how long it was, but there was a time there.
	In this subject, it kind of ebbs and flows, as you know.
	So lately, in the last couple of years, we've had a re-emergence of activity.
	And it's, and again, it doesn't repeat itself.
	The characteristics are that they're very unsuspecting as to, you do not suspect the time
	or the kind of performance or the timing of the performance, number one.
	Yeah.
	These do not repeat themselves either in the same way, number two.
	And number three, There does not appear to be a hostile intent.
	It's not a performance that appears to deliberately or, you know, cause harm.
	More like poltergeist activity.
	Yeah, there is a sense of game with it.
	There is a strong sense and I'm not sure, you know, I won't go down the relationship Characterizing it as relationships or anything like of that sort.
	But there is, I'm sure you know, there's, you know, this is a topic that seems to lend itself to conscious behavior or consciousness connections.
	I'll put it that way.
	That's right.
	And so you can get the feeling that there is an awareness that we can't account for.
	There is an awareness That is not something in which you have control over, and so therefore these performances are at the behest of the performer.
	We are an observer and a bystander and a participant, willing or unwilling, in this, and we are getting an education.
	You know, all of this kind of stuff produces information.
	And just like the little spacecraft that we're flying in an attempt of trying to do something grand someday, it's all very informational.
	And you know, in the cattle mutilation area, for example, gosh, we've researched all these different subjects from crop circles and cattle mutilations and abductees and And propulsion systems and shapes of craft and all kinds of other consciousness connected kind of things.
	And, and so, you know, you just, well, I don't know where you want me to go in this, but I think that in the cattle, I mean, the cattle mutilation area has an example for if you, if you want to say, well, what could you make use of?
	Let's, let's say this, suppose you were to ask the question, Well, is there anything about this that might relate beneficially to an application, you know, that you could do in some time soon?
	Well, I would say in a cattle mutilation area, for example, gosh, there are some very interesting exhibitions of relatively non-invasive surgery That have removed a great deal of tissue from an animal and you don't know under what circumstance that animal was anesthetized or was it already dead or what, but the less invasives you can make your surgery, the faster your recovery, right?
	Of course.
	So in a space-based application, that's very important.
	You don't want a lot of loose liquids flying around and so you want to do things to heal a patient.
	that are the least invasive that you could do.
	I never thought about that.
	There might actually be application there.
	I never thought about that.
	Alright, Bob.
	I've got a whopper of a question when I get back.
	I know you've funded scientists.
	You've looked into consciousness.
	You've looked into survival of what are, I guess, our soul after physical death.
	And so when we get back, I want to ask you if you've come to any conclusions with everything you've funded about life after death.
	Bob Bigelow, back in a moment.
	For years and years, behind the scenes, most of it, frankly, behind the scenes, Bob Bigelow has funded scientists who are looking into areas that we talk about all the time on Coast to Coast AM.
	Areas like survival of consciousness beyond bodily death, as an example.
	He's done work and And has funded people that you just, you wouldn't believe.
	There's been a very great deal of it behind the scenes that's gone on.
	So in a moment, we'll ask Bob what he thinks about that.
	Stay right there.
	Bob, I probably only know about a small portion of the funding that you've done of various scientists into this area, but I wonder if you've come to any personal conclusions over the years about survival of consciousness, an increasingly important question for you and I, beyond death.
	Do you believe that it does survive?
	Well, you sure kicked this conversation up a couple notches, didn't you?
	Yes, I did.
	Bam!
	You just knocked it up.
	Yeah, this is the Holy Grail, isn't it, of topics.
	This really is.
	And I am a person that has difficulty accepting things on faith alone.
	This is the way I am.
	And so I'm one that needs quite a few rocks on the pile for convincing.
	And I'm also, I need more than just one pile of rocks.
	I have to have different ways that I come about I'm validating a hypothesis or some notion or some piece of
	information that I get.
	I always come at it multiple ways, different directions.
	So for me, on this particular topic which is so profound, so huge and has so much diverse
	meaning behind it, I came at it multiple directions.
	Now in this area, let's talk about consciousness for a minute because we're talking about does
	consciousness survive bodily death.
	And then we have to say, well, exactly what do we know about consciousness?
	What is it that we think we really know?
	And of course, none of our science, our traditional science can, whether it's quantum mechanics or not, can begin to handle the subject of consciousness.
	And it has, there are so many different, in this whole theater, there are many, many different compartments to this whole area.
	For example, you know, we can talk about consciousness as it affects things in micro, macro PK, or psychometry, mental telepathy, remote viewing, the power of prayer, We have all kinds of famous authors that have written about apparitions and poltergeists.
	We have even the remote viewing that was famously engaged by the CIA for 20 years.
	for 20 years and friends of ours who have been running those programs for SRI.
	And so we have in Bob John and Brenda Dunn's work at Pair on random remote generators.
	You bet.
	And so we understand all that.
	We know those people.
	And so we know that if we look at any one of these kinds of areas and say, is there any substance to any of this stuff?
	I mean, can we find one white crow?
	If you find one lousy white crow here, you've got a problem from a normal science context.
	In that context, you have a problem.
	And so what I did was I tried to find as many, our first one white crow and was there a second one or a third and how did I really know it was a white crow?
	And so you'd go down that road and until finally you say, yeah, there's legitimacy here because there are too many validations of this.
	So then you get into Oh gosh, other subjects like past lives that Brian Weiss engages in, and that opens up all kinds, because then you find out guys like Harold Sherman wrote about this a long time ago, and then you find out people like William James wrote about it even way before that, and William James was no slouch.
	He was a world-class scientist and researcher in his time, even James Pike.
	So you had these kinds of folks, and so for me, I went back like I did in the UFO topic.
	In fact, our Science Advisory Board, you may not know this, when we initially formed NIDS, it had two pillars of interest.
	UFOs and consciousness.
	And we had a population of members on that board that fit in both camps.
	And so we were blessed to have, like, you know, Ian Stevenson was a member, and we had William Morris, I think.
	Yes, Melvin Morris, sorry.
	Melvin Morris was.
	Emily Cook, who was also an associate of Ian Stevenson's and other people, very well.
	Very high caliber, world-class researchers.
	Top people, I know.
	Yeah, very top.
	We talked with people like Larry Dossey, familiar with all of his work in The Power of Prayer, and how do you validate that?
	Do you have double-blind studies where you have a placebo situation and you're able to validate that?
	The control group is securely in place, and yet, you know, you're having this effect.
	And is there a difference between whether the patient is assisted by the physician, or is there a factor of how many people are praying?
	Does that make a difference?
	Or the conviction of the people that are praying, including the physician?
	Is there a component here that's connected to the belief?
	How strong is the belief in facilitating this?
	And then you get into the apparitional side of it, and poltergeist activity.
	And so, I think, long story short, I do believe in a God force.
	I think I come at that from a cosmological prospect as well as a belief that the accumulation of all these other things suggests that to me very, very, very strongly.
	And I do think there is a survival of consciousness because there are just far too many fields that tell us consciousness can operate independent of time.
	It can operate independent of location.
	I mean, look at Edgar Cayce.
	You don't have to, you know, a person doesn't have to take any one of these things and say, well, gee, I don't really kind of believe all that really happened that Edgar Cayce could do those things and so forth.
	Well, then move into one of the other topics and research the hell out of that and see if you go from topic to topic to topic until you come up with a white crow and now you've got a problem.
	If you're a skeptic, you have a problem here.
	Sure.
	You know, and I'll try to explain that.
	And so, eventually you come to these topics and you find out that, oh my gosh, consciousness behaves independent of any of the explanations of normal science and physics, and independent of your container, in a sense, that in several different ways it exhibits independence of the container that is spawning that consciousness.
	Here, here.
	Did you find or do you believe there to be any connection, Robert, between consciousness and the appearance of UFOs?
	Oh gosh, yes.
	I thought you might say that.
	Oh gosh, yes.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I want to allow the audience to ask some questions, but I really did have to get that in.
	Joe in Baltimore, Maryland says, good evening.
	I'd like to congratulate you, your guest on his work.
	If I might be so bold, I'd like to encourage him to consider promoting it to the public more.
	We need hope in this world more now than ever.
	What you're doing here can give us that, a new dream, and in this country, Bob, Since we've been to the moon and haven't been back, we've lost something.
	Something is missing in America.
	Would you agree?
	Oh, absolutely.
	Heck yes.
	We're missing inspiration, for Christ's sake.
	We are missing inspiration in this country.
	Yeah, we really are.
	And I guess if it's not going to come from our government, or some of it will, certainly the private sector obviously has a lot to offer.
	Anybody who's been up to look at the photographs that I took, and I only got around a little bit, is going to know how very, very serious your effort is.
	It's not just talk.
	I have a lot of people on this program who talk.
	It's a talk show.
	But you're doing, and you're really doing.
	So we need hope in this country, and I don't know where the next big hope comes from, but maybe it won't be government.
	Well, you know what?
	Government is good at some things, and lousy at a lot of others.
	And government really is not good at advanced planning.
	Our government is good as a reactionary force.
	We are a fabulous, fantastic Power in a reaction as a point-counterpoint kind of reaction.
	So we are very good in a sense of emergency.
	We are very good in the sense of a serious challenge.
	But we're terrible in advanced planning.
	And we do not provide, and it's not really appropriate for the United States government to be looked to for providing inspiration.
	It just will not.
	And historically it has not come from a government.
	It comes from the people.
	It comes from some action or actions of a group of people in some way that provide inspiration.
	And I think that, you know, there's a movement here as far as space topic is concerned by a number of companies, not just ours, but a number of companies.
	There's probably, you know, six, seven, eight companies here in this country that are doing, trying to do very challenging, unique things that can be, if they're successful, They can be terribly inspirational and we know that the age group, there was a recent study and it showed that the age group of people between 18 and 24 years of age, 48% of them didn't even know anything about the International Space Station.
	72% of them were ambivalent about space and couldn't care less.
	As to whatever happened.
	And that's a function that nothing has been going on.
	The answer is, Art, we need to have some action.
	You can't have inspiration if there's no action.
	That's right.
	You know?
	How are you supposed to be inspired when there's no action, when there's nobody doing anything?
	And in our sense with NASA, it's been the same-o same-o as far as the shuttle flights and so forth for years and years and years.
	There's just real no action.
	All right.
	Let me go to the phones.
	Marcus in Los Angeles, you're on with Robert Bigelow.
	Hey, how are you doing today?
	Quite well, thank you.
	Great.
	Well, I just want to say it's great to have you back in this country.
	By the way, it's a couple months you've been here, but Mr. Bigelow, I know you have your place out in the desert there as well.
	I was wondering if any, like, Do you have any plans of having a certain kind of colony or like setting up a country there in the future for next generations?
	And the next comment is also... I'm not sure I got that one straight.
	What was the question again?
	Talking about private businesses and you know companies or countries and things interested in going there and I was wondering if there's any plans to like have a some kind of I'm still not sure I got the first question.
	Robert, did you?
	station that he is building. And the next comment would be just basically if any
	secret societies or secret police been monitoring him and have any of these
	people been talking about trying to get better themselves.
	Okay, I'm still not sure I got the first question. Robert, did you? Well, I'll
	take a stab at it, I guess.
	You know, we're... space now has evolved into less of a question mark in terms of
	can it possibly happen for us to, oh my gosh, okay, it looks like it has a good
	chance and what do we do for... how do we prepare for success and what is the
	business program like and who are those prospective clients going to be and...
	So if we look at who's going to populate, yes, we've looked a lot at who the prospects are to populate these complexes, and all of that, however, is orchestrated in the context of a business plan that would be respectable if you were to present it to a banker or to a Wall Street person.
	It has to have enough integrity that it's going to stand on its own feet and be able to be conscripted, if necessary, into a stock market offering situation or a portion of it
	or that it has borrowing capabilities and it has the kind of horsepower that that provides.
	Now we have not, we don't, we're not in contact with any kind of esoteric groups that are
	overseeing what we do and probably they're so good at that that we don't even, we're
	not aware that they are peering into into what we're doing.
	We're fairly transparent, you know.
	Folks wouldn't have to look too hard, the NSA or anybody else, into what we're doing, the CIA.
	We're pretty transparent.
	Have you become aware of any surveillance at all?
	Well, we know that folks know that we exist.
	But I think people understand where we're coming from.
	I think people understand that That we're trying to do something for this country, we're trying to do something for people in other countries, and we're trying to do a benefit to human development globally.
	This isn't just a story about one company, our company, we're part of a family of companies that are trying to fulfill something for the private sector, generated from private enterprise, that maybe can take this out of the purview of government Owned and operated and controlled activity.
	Is there going to become an official consortium of private companies?
	Well, we're all kind of like a herd of cats, you know?
	We all kind of go off in our own direction and yeah, we do have membership.
	There is an organization that a lot of us belong to.
	There's a certain sense of self-preservation from Uncle Sam, you know?
	Because we're small and And it's easy to get stepped on and crushed and pounded into the sand.
	And Uncle Sam may not even be aware that he's done that.
	So yeah, we do have an organization that we want.
	The last caller would want to know if you have a secret handshake.
	No, some of the signals like that that we say for other people, no, can't be aired.
	Alright, Paul in Missouri, you're on with Robert Bigelow.
	Hi.
	Evening Art, evening Mr. Bigelow.
	I had a couple of points that were interesting for you.
	First, let me go ahead and identify myself.
	I'm Carl in Hallsville, Missouri.
	I'm sorry, it says Paul.
	K0AZI.
	And that's 30 years, and that's a kilo-zero error.
	Okay, hold on.
	You can't really give call letters on the air, so go ahead and ask your question.
	Okay, yeah.
	I was going to throw a religious element in here.
	Now, I'm not particularly sure if God, if it's a standard religion format through a lot of religions, that God created us in His own image, or if that's just particular.
	But if it is throughout several religions, did not God as a creation and as to himself give man the power to create?
	And God being able to create reality in which we now live, do we not perhaps have the power to create as a collective consciousness or perhaps even individually our own realities?
	All right.
	Give it a try.
	Well, yeah.
	Actually, there are some physicists and scientists that have kind of come to the conclusion that there is a God force that has a conscious aspect to it.
	In fact, there's a new book out by Bernie Hayes, who is a zero-point expert, as is Hal Puthoff, And in his new book, it's something like the God Theory, and he espouses the notion that a lot of us have, that if there is a universal God force that was prior to the Big Bang existing and caused that information to take place, that probably that permeates every single organic and non-organic substance in the entire universe.
	That all of it, every single thing in the entire universe, is part of that God force, and that way that God force in
	theory is able to express itself by being part of every living and non-living thing.
	I wonder if there's any limit to the creation that we're going to be allowed to do.
	Well, I would guess there would be.
	In other words, when we get to creating life ourselves, we may not be that far from it.
	All right.
	Robert Bigelow is my guest.
	We're going to take a break here and come back and take your calls.
	I'm Art Bell.
	God, I'd love to take a ride.
	I'd love it.
	Matter of fact, a friend of mine contacted Zero G.
	Robert Bigelow is my guest.
	727s up and it just so happens that 727s going to be in the Las Vegas area in
	September and I may take a ride that may be as close as I'll ever get but what an
	opportunity that would be huh so there you've got it why not be interesting to
	experience zero G wouldn't it Robert Bigelow is my guest he'll be right back
	seems to me that if some of you were to contact Congress your congressperson
	perhaps those on the space and science committees and sort of make a general
	request that those who are reaching out like Bob Bigelow that the path be
	greased a little a little bit better for them because it's it's rough going it
	It's really rough going.
	We had a long, long conversation about that.
	And I'm not sure exactly where the pressure is applied, so I guess a general pressure in Congress would be a good idea, and let them have a good hard look at what people like Mr. Bigelow are doing.
	David in Tempe, Arizona, you're on the air with Robert Bigelow.
	Thank you, Mr. Bell.
	I'm a past guest to the guy who wrote a book called Sunstroke.
	Oh, Mr. Bell, special, sincere congratulations to you for your Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award.
	Oh, well, thank you.
	Oh, my gosh.
	You have indeed set the highest standards for excellence in radio broadcasting.
	Thank you very much.
	This is David, who wrote a book called Sunstroke, which was about a satellite that returned energy.
	It was a science fiction book about a satellite that returned energy to Earth.
	And of course in science fiction, so in that book, the satellite began to wander and of course the field of energy began to burn its path across buildings and humanity and everything in its way.
	David Kagan, is that correct?
	That's correct, Mr. Bill.
	Thank you so very much.
	And I would like to change the subject matter a little bit here.
	I have a couple questions for your outstanding esteemed guest, Mr. Bigelow.
	Mr. Bigelow?
	Yes?
	I'm on Cloud Nine speaking with you, sir.
	Believe me.
	Well, I greatly admire your stunning accomplishments, both in science and technology, and especially, my gosh, Genesis One.
	Wow!
	You know, you do remind me a little of Bill Lear, but what you're doing is far larger and infinitely more important for humanity.
	And, as I mentioned to Mr. Bell, I've got a couple questions for you.
	Go ahead, David.
	Thank you.
	Does Bigelow Aerospace have any plans to lease orbital labs for doing R&D research and perhaps manufacturing pharmaceuticals in microgravity, drugs that could possibly lead to miraculous cures of disease on Earth?
	Pharmaceutical applications has always been The category that people have referred to most often as applicable to that location, and we very definitely intend to target that entire community as prospective clients.
	Fabulous.
	Fabulous.
	No doubt it will be a great boon to humanity, perhaps in the near future.
	Wonderful news.
	Now, my second question is, would you at all be interested And participating in a feature film thriller that does indeed spotlight Bigelow Aerospace in a highly positive way.
	In other words, you guys saved the world from a different kind of catastrophe that could actually happen.
	Would you at all be interested in something like that?
	Does that kind of resonate at all with you, sir?
	Oh, not, you know, to be honest, Dave, it probably doesn't because we're kind of in our own little thriller every day, every week and month and trying to do what we're about.
	But I thank you for the offer and the invitation.
	However, the concept of becoming as public as you can be, Robert, under the circumstances is probably a good one.
	That's true.
	That is true.
	For multiple reasons.
	Yes.
	All right.
	Anne in Walnut Creek, California.
	You're on with Robert.
	I was afraid I was going to have to follow that because I wasn't going to be anywhere near as complimentary.
	That's quite all right.
	All right.
	And I'm not feeling negative, but I am feeling questioning.
	You know, I think it's wonderfully exciting and I guess The best word to describe Mr. Bigelow in my mind is adventurer, or explorer.
	And what I'm concerned about, and I know you are too, Art, and this is not the first time that I've commented about this on your program, I'm concerned that there will be an inadvertent return to Earth, not necessarily in Mr. Bigelow's exploring, but in someone's, Of, say, microbes that could wipe out all life on Earth.
	And I think that already the NASA people have admitted that they were careless in the beginning.
	And of course, their use of the word sterilization of spaceships, I don't know what techniques they're talking about, whether it's extreme temperatures or chemicals or whatever.
	But I mean, even on Earth right now, we have an example of of microbes that cannot be killed, namely prions, which as far as we can tell cannot be killed by extremes of temperature or chemicals.
	And there are about four different categories of ways that we could destroy ourselves, and that's one of them.
	And then a couple of others are from our not applying our energy and brains and money to trying to prevent things like not looking out for
	asteroids, you know, instead we're waging war.
	So I just wonder what Mr. Bigelow thinks about this and how concerned he is about it.
	Okay, well let's stick with the microbe question.
	I'm not sure how much of an issue that is with LeoCraft or any other craft that are doing anything other than going to the moon or Mars.
	Then you'd certainly have that concern, but who knows?
	Robert?
	Yeah, I think you have two sources for that concern.
	One is something that was brought back from a from another planet or body in some way that had some contaminant with it.
	Now, we have experienced on this planet for almost five billion years, four and a half billion years, meteors and meteorites hitting this planet of sizable quantities and they There were sufficient mass that survived re-entry and did not burn up and so it would suggest that if there are microbes indigenous to those kinds of foreign bodies that they somehow are acceptable if in fact there were living organisms inside meteors and that sort of structure.
	The other is the quarantine process that would be automatic if you were to come from Mars to Earth and And from the moon with any materials and of course those were all quarantined from the moon.
	About 875 pounds of material was brought back and so that was all quarantined.
	The other area though is something that would be, let's suppose, created inadvertently or intentionally on board a space complex.
	And we've had to look at that.
	And so what we've decided is that we have rules of behavior that we would then implement these rules where it pertains to what activities
	are being functioned on board these systems, these modules, and could they be used for
	military purposes, let's say, or some sort of harmful intent.
	Now, so the thing of it is that we're not going to be the only ones creating these complexes
	over a period of time.
	Other countries are going to.
	Other companies are going to.
	We're not going to be alone in an isolated situation forever on this.
	I think in the macro sense what you've got to say to yourself is this.
	Look, there are probably I think, Art, you and I have talked about this before.
	I felt, well, there's always two kinds of species in the entire universe.
	There are those that have command and control over robust facilities in space.
	And there are those species that have not, and that do not.
	And I think if you say, well, which group has probably a greater enhancement of a future, in all respects, It's probably the group that has both command and control over robust, large facilities in space-based locations, as well as terrestrial locations, as opposed to the one that only ever has half the menu.
	It's like having a periodic table.
	One group has a periodic table of 175, the other group has 115.
	So it isn't fair.
	So you might think, well, gee, the group with the access to the space-based facilities ought to be able then to innovate positive things.
	Not just negative, but positive things.
	And perhaps enhance the length of duration of life, find cure for cancer, muscular dystrophy, who knows?
	So maybe there's a holy grail or two or three waiting, unbeknownst to us, for significant enhancement of physical problems that we have now that maybe other species do not have those because they long ago solved them.
	Well, if I were to be asked where I think pharmaceutical companies would be more likely to be developing positive things for the human race, perhaps curing diseases in a spacecraft like yours or in a U.S.
	government spacecraft, I'd have a real quick answer.
	Bob in Kansas City, Missouri, you're on with Robert Bigelow.
	Hey, how are you Art and Mr. Bigelow?
	I'm enjoying this program tonight.
	As a retired biochemist and drug scientist, and now a science fiction writer, I've got a couple of questions for you, and I realize you've had a lot of difficulties with the government on getting some of your programs off the ground.
	Governments are easy to take power away, but they're kind of hard to get it back to the people.
	You mentioned that you're having a lot of bureaucratic red tape.
	Have you been approached, or have you considered approaching, Second tier or third tier countries who I'm sure would more than love to have a spaceport as part of their program To set your system up or for that matter even getting an abandoned oil platform or a natural gas platform outside the 12-mile limit Or you wouldn't have to deal with these crazy bureaucrats, and I'll take my answer offline, sir Okay Okay well in
	The short answer is no, we have not.
	This is the first year we have actually started to promote or even expose what our business program is.
	We've kept quiet for all this time and we've decided because of last year's activity with a number of companies that had asked us to sign letters of intent and memorandums of agreement on relationships with them that we would do more harm than good if we postponed this for another year or two.
	So we have not had any engagement of conversations with other countries yet that might occur this year, however.
	But I'm not sure I quite got the question relative to the 12-mile limit, unless it is for a launch facility like Space Sea Launch is, where Sea Launch goes to an equatorial area on the ocean and then launches a Zenit vehicle from that location.
	But certainly, we will be most anxious to contract with folks who provide user-friendly spaceport locations and facilities, as well as the transportation facilities.
	Okay.
	From Toronto, Canada, Chris, you're on the air with Robert Bigelow.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Our great show today.
	Congratulations on the award.
	Thank you.
	Uh, Mr. Bigelow, uh, there's one kind of giant elephant in the room that I haven't really heard you address, and it's probably one of the holy grails of the physical problems that you mentioned earlier, and that is artificial gravity.
	Uh, being in the Space Hotel, um, I can't imagine a lot of people being, you know, all of a sudden used to, um, suddenly floating and going through 30, 60 days, however the lease is, uh, just floating around.
	So, how would you figure to solve the problem using, like, artificial gravity or training courses or what?
	I'll take my answer off the air.
	Okay.
	Thank you.
	Yes, well, our first target market, of course, is not the tourist sector, per se.
	It is the professional astronaut community to expand those cores, expand those numbers, and those folks are more accustomed to expecting that environment and what it has to offer.
	And secondly, if we go to serving prime clients, international sized corporations, and even nations as clients, they may want payload specialists or they may not.
	So in that case, our own astronaut corps will function, incidentally, free of charge, the experiments that they want to implement.
	But if they do want payload specialists, then we will train and fly those people as well.
	So they will probably be more orientated than the novice would be in both of those instances.
	The tourist is in a novice category.
	And to date, there have not been all that many, for sure.
	And however, gee, if Anoussa Ansari is any example, she is a tremendous spokeswoman for for tourism and uh... she was she was ecstatic about the experience that she had and most of the other experiencers have felt the same way that they want to go back and uh... uh... so i think that that having artificial gravity is probably not a prerequisite for uh... getting these structures to be uh... successful is it uh... is it something you considered it is uh... to to
	To avoid the Coriolis effect of AG, you need to have a structure of a certain rotation speed and spin, and those RPMs are a function of the entire length of that structure.
	If it were a quarter of a mile in length, in sort of a large barbell, dumbbell kind of configuration, that AG is produced better at the extremities of that structure.
	And then you have docking concerns because you need either to hold a center core stable for docking purposes or it has to be in motion with that structure at the same speed.
	There may be times when that rotation needs to stop and then you'd have to queue it up again.
	That is for more advanced deep space missions than probably is necessary in the first generation of LEO operations, but you might consider that for a Mars expedition.
	Do we know a lot about the prolonged biological effects of weightlessness on human beings?
	We know a fair amount.
	We know that there's a degradation of muscle mass and bone supply at a rate of 1% per month and then it tends to level off.
	However, that can be mitigated by aggressive exercise.
	That's a direct relationship with the amount of exercise that's imposed on the I think so.
	on the physical structure, then the reaction is positive to that exercise.
	So, but the good news is that it does taper off and...
	Does it actually level off so that we can imagine a trip to Mars and back?
	I think so.
	I think so because we already have folks, both Russian and American,
	that have ventured to a year in space, which would be beyond the duration of weightlessness
	that you would have to endure going to Mars.
	And of course, if you had a system that could get you there in a month and a half or two months or so, so much the better.
	Wow.
	Well, I would like to congratulate you.
	We're coming to the end of the program.
	You know, when it's over, it's over.
	There's nothing we can do.
	But I would like to congratulate you on doing what a lot of people have dreamed about doing and you're not dreaming, you're doing it.
	So, let's stay in touch.
	I really want to get that ham repeater up there, Bob.
	So, let's look into that one.
	And, of course, we will have you back, obviously, with what you're doing.
	The story will continue forever.
	Well, thank you, Art.
	This has been a great fun tonight.
	The four hours went by so fast.
	I'm still jazzed up and not the least bit sleepy.
	And thank you very much for this opportunity.
	Okay.
	Good night, Bob.
	That's Robert Bigelow.
	He's really one of a kind, folks.
	And that's it for tonight.
	We'll be back here tomorrow night, same time, same station, from the high desert.

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