The Space Show: Behind the Scenes
Dr. David Livingston is the founder and host of The Space Show®, a live broadcast internet radio space educational talk show program. In the 20 years and almost 4,000 live radio interviews, The Space Show is the nation’s only live talk radio show about everything space. It covers space commerce, tourism, missions, science, economics, and development, to enable our growing space-faring economy and society.
Join us for a special event with Dr. Livingston and two of his longtime supporters, content providers, and advisors, Kim Holder and John Jossy. Kim and John will turn the tables on Dr. Livingston, with the longtime host becoming the interviewee. Listen as they delve into the history of The Space Show, finding out interesting tidbits about the many interviews and exploring Dr. Livingston’s philosophy and motivations. There will be some time for the audience to ask their burning questions at the end of the program.
In addition to being the founder and host of The Space Show®, Dr. David Livingston is also the Executive Director of the One Giant Leap Foundation, Inc. (OGLF), the 501(C)3 that controls The Space Show and promote space education. He was an Adjunct Professor of Space Studies in the Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences at the University of North Dakota where he taught graduate classes on commercial space for more than a decade. Livingston has a BA in Political Science, an MBA specializing in International Business Management & Economics, and a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA). His 2001 dissertation was titled Outer Space Commerce: Its History and Prospects. Dr. Livingston did his graduate and post graduate work at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, CA.
Livingston is a frequent speaker at space conferences and has published more than 50 papers including chapters in books and peer reviewed works. For example, he authored the Space Tourism chapter in the Space Encyclopedia and co-authored three business and financial chapters in the New SMAD Textbook, Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD. David has lectured at several universities and has been a guest on many national and international radio programs in the U.S. and throughout Europe. In addition, he co-hosts a weekly radio segment, Hotel Mars, on the John Batchelor Show, a nationally syndicated radio program. Lastly, Dr. Livingston is frequently interviewed by authors writing books on space development, commerce, and policy. When not teaching, broadcasting, writing, or just playing, Livingston consults with those working to establish a commercial space ventures and policy, plus he works with students and their space focused research projects. He also makes time for his family and Pepper, his Siberian Husky, who is the unofficial Space Show mascot and featured on The Space Show website. Livingston is in the early stages of writing the first twenty year history of The Space Show.
Kim Holder studied sculpture at the Ontario College of Art and Design in the late 80s. After that she led the life of a ne’er-do-well for a couple of decades due to a chronic fatigue problem. It got so bad she moved to Mexico in a desperate attempt to get her life under control, figuring she could live cheaply and try to return to her art work. There she met her husband Aldo. She hardly spoke any Spanish, nor he much English, but somehow it worked. Under his protection, she finally managed to identify a diet and lifestyle that allowed her to have a normal energy level, but by then she was in her mid 40s.
So she searched for a project, since Aldo’s businesses looked after things. Her life long interest in space and futurism led her to establish Moonwards, a project to build a lunar town as an online game world that evolves as its community adds to it. She also continues the meditation practice she learned as a resident of the Toronto Zen Centre and later the Rochester Zen Center. She is a devout agnostic.
John Jossy became interested in space development back in the early 1970s when as a teenager he watched Star Trek, saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and voraciously read Analog Science Fiction and Fact. In high school, as an amateur astronomer he built two telescopes by hand and wrote a report on space solar power satellites in his senior physics class. He dreamed of going to the stars, but that dream faded after he learned about the limitations imposed by the laws of physics. Nevertheless, he became hooked on space advocacy after reading the High Frontier and became a Senior Associate of the Space Studies Institute since its early days, as well as a member of the National Space Society. He always believed that Gerard K. O’Neill’s vision of space settlement would be realized and hoped it would be within our lifetime.
John has a Bachelors Degree in Physical Science with a minor in Astronomy from UC Berkeley. In 1980 he was hired as a Product Assurance Engineer at Varian Associates (now Communications and Power Industries) where he worked on a Department of Energy program to develop a 200 kilowatt continuous wave microwave tube called a gyrotron used in fusion energy research. In 1992, after being laid off from Varian at the end of the Reagan defense buildup, he got started in the Medical Device Industry where he held positions as a Sr. Quality Engineer, Quality Manager and Director of QA and Regulatory Affairs at both small start-ups and larger established medical device companies for 28 years.
From 1990 to 1993 John published a bi-monthly newsletter called Space Colonization Progress. From 1993 to 1995 he was Technical Editor for the Spacefaring Gazette, the newsletter of the Golden Gate Chapter of the National Space Society. More recently, in 2016 he participated in March Storm, an annual project of the Alliance for Space Development where private citizens travel to Washington DC and meet with members of Congress advocating for support of space development initiatives. John is a lifetime member of Icarus Interstellar. In 2019 he joined the Advisory Board of the One Giant Leap Foundation which controls and operates The Space Show created and hosted by Dr. David Livingston. Having recently retired from the medical device industry he now devotes more of his time to space advocacy and continuing efforts to popularize research and technology that will enable human settlement of the solar system and beyond. He blogs on space settlement at https://spacesettlementprogress.com/
The recording of this event is now on our Youtube channel:
https://youtu.be/BTA8pVcqUhc