This is the full 7 hour committee meeting of the Augustine Commission looking at a Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans. Each speaker is an individual video and you can jump around all 26 parts if you desire.


  1. usko says:
    June 29, 2009 at 4:56 pm

    haven’t watceh all of it yet but it seems to be fascinating so far

    Reply
    • Benjamin Higginbotham says:
      June 29, 2009 at 7:46 pm

      Fascinating in a… the information is incredible but presented extremely dry… sort of way. 7 hours of content here… 7 hours…

      Reply
      • usko says:
        June 29, 2009 at 9:51 pm

        well yeah.. but I don’t really have anything better to do till I get the results of my 4-year high school exams back.

        It’s really too bad you guys aren’t going with the DIRECT option. But then again, it’s your money so… Still, I think you could get more bang for your buck if you did that.

        Reply
  2. usko says:
    June 29, 2009 at 10:24 pm

    on the last video now. Don’t regret watching a minute of it

    Reply
    • Benjamin Higginbotham says:
      June 29, 2009 at 10:45 pm

      I wish we could get a few more Americans to watch it too. Seems we are too fascinated with Desperate Housewives, Dancing with Stars, news coming from TMZ and bad TV in general. Too bad, we should stop consuming so much and start producing again. Maybe produce, oh, I don’t know, a new economy based on space. Instead we’ll just give it up to some other country after dominating it for 40 years. [/rant]

      Reply
      • push2play says:
        June 29, 2009 at 11:48 pm

        And NASA does little, if anything, to reach the masses who watch those programs. I remember watching ‘The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau’ and wouldn’t be surprised at the impact those specials had on oceanography/oceanology.

        NASA has had the same opportunity to bring the science, the discovery and wonder of space into our living rooms for as many years as the average American could afford a set. But what did they do? Let the networks cover the launches and otherwise work behind the proverbial, closed doors.

        I mean, here they recently serviced Hubble, what went into the design and construction of the various elements being installed? Unless you dug deep and did your own research, you’d never know because NASA didn’t produce a special concerning it. What about the experiments on ISS? You’d have a hard time finding one person in a hundred, maybe a thousand, who would be able to name one experiment currently underway aboard the ISS.

        People aren’t interested in space because they haven’t been given a reason to be. Jacques Cousteau never waited for the invitation, he produced what was a passion for him and sold it to the networks and from that engaged the larger public.

        NASA has done little to capture the public’s imaginations, to excite interest in exploration or give reason to push deeper into space. As I’ve said before, space (and the science/engineering to get there) is inherently cool, NASA has an uncanny way of making that dull.

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        • Benjamin Higginbotham says:
          June 30, 2009 at 5:51 am

          True, but being that we’re trying to fill that gap, what can Spacevidcast do to make it more interesting? What can we do to get in to more households and get people excited about this again? We don’t have the same level of access that NASA does, but… we do have passion and that’s a start!

          Reply
          • push2play says:
            June 30, 2009 at 8:36 pm

            To try and answer your question, let me put together a commission to study your current architecture and make recommendations based on those findings.

            What you’re doing is fantastic. You’re not only irreverent but informative and interactive which is tremendous. As far as suggestions how to make space more interesting… If given the reins of NASA tv, what would you do? What content would you produce? How would you market it to networks and/or new media? That would be my answer to your question.

          • push2play says:
            July 14, 2009 at 2:10 am

            I remember seeing a NASA News conference where Bill Gerstenmeir was asked if the Cirque space tourist would bring more attention/interest to the flight. He said that his love/passion was the engineering side and found it all interesting, exciting… and yes, the engineering is amazing, but for NASA to engage a broader audience they have to be appealing to those who are interested in the artistic, the visual aspect of space flight as well.

            While you were filling time between the scrub of 127 and launch of Falcon 1 answering lots of questions, but not really about the impact a scrub has on the ISS, the mission Kopra was assigned to do starting last month (has wakata taken up the slack until he gets there, are they trained to do this before hand and how will the impact affect Stott if 127 is delayed even further, the 26th of July?) See, these are the things NASA glosses over, may mention them in a press briefing if asked, but otherwise it’s business as usual. There could be a segment for a show to find out the implications that launch delays have on the Wakata’s, Kopras and other mission specialists who are delayed getting to orbit.

            Listening to the show, realize you’re a tech geek, but look to the larger picture and you’ll add a good deal of depth to the show.

  3. Phis says:
    June 30, 2009 at 4:28 am

    Thanks for posting that up, B&C and NASA. Very interesting and enlightening, though I do feel the need for a drink now…

    Here’s to bold plans and big action, and hopefully they’ll be properly funded when it’s time…

    Reply
  4. Shanuson says:
    June 30, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    One thing i want to point to that was new before;
    The 1:2850 in chance of a crew lose for ares I is only a mean, and only a fictive number used to compare diffrent types of ares I and other launch vehicle development plans. you cant compare it to the number for the spaceshuttle. thats at least how i understand the answer in video 7.

    Reply
  5. Marcus says:
    June 30, 2009 at 4:22 pm

    Thank you very much for all the effort it took took you to cut this and upload it on youtube!

    While I agree, that some of it is a bit boring and dry, it is also true that all this is very exciting, because we really are watching history being made. We are at a turning point in space exploration and the final report by this commission will have a significant (maybe we could even say “huge”?) impact on the direction space exploration will take in the coming years and probably even decades. We aren’t simply watching either, because through those public hearings we really can connect to the people who are looking into all this and probably even make at least a small contribution to the whole process.

    But when I say “we” I guess it should be more a “you” because I find all this very exciting despite being an European… or maybe because I am.

    Lets face it: if you are excited about space exploration and happen to live in Europe, you pretty much have to look at the US and Russia if you don’t want to limit yourself to once in a while robotic exploration missions. Since Russia’s human spaceflight program these days is pretty much limited to the ISS and their plans for a replacement for the Soyuz is a) not yet very mature (or at least not available to the public… I think they are still way too much secretive about what they are doing) and b) not especially exciting (KLIPR was interesting, but iirc that has been droped in favor to a more traditional capsule design.. again), we just have to look over the big pond to NASA and hope that they will do something exciting.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love what ESA does and I think they are pretty good at it and I also like how they try to get as much international cooperation as possible, but I really think that Europe should do more.

    There was one part of Jean-Jacques Dordains speech, that I think was actually quite embarrassing, where he more or less openly admitted, that whatever ESA will do in the coming years depends on what NASA does.

    I really hope that on the next ESA meeting (I think Dordain said sometime late this year?) ESA members will have the guts to increase the funding and give the green light to an independent European Human Spaceflight Program. NOT because I think we should compete with NASA, Roskosmos, India, China or anybody else, but simply because I do not want to be dependent on the goodwill of others to take our astronauts into space.

    I think it would be best for all of us if the future will bring even more international cooperation in Human Spaceflight. My “dream” would be if NASA, ESA, Roskosmos and whoever else want’s to participate would sit together and come up with a truly international architecture for missions beyond LEO. Not exactly like on ISS where everbody does it’s part to contribute to the overall mission, but more by the way of defining complete specifications on all the necessary interfaces, so that in the end it doesn’t matter which module was built by whom.

    best regards from Austria,
    Marcus

    PS: I guess I need to get a sponsor because watching/reading all that space related stuff and then comment on it as well really keeps me from getting my work done! ;)

    Reply