Once again, I’m honored to have been asked to speak in the Space and Science tracks at Dragon*Con.

Dragon takes over downtown Atlanta during Labor Day weekend. It’s enormous. All the public reports of attendance are wrong… they admit to “40,000+” but that’s low-balled to avoid fire code problems.

But for those of you who don’t know, there is a wing of the Hilton reserved for the few hundred attendees who are too geeky for DragonCon… and that’s where the Space and Science tracks are. (Plus a couple of others, like Skeptics, EFF, and Podcasting.) Yes, when most normal humans would be going in search of Princess Leia bikini models, we’re learning about astrophysics and nuclear power plants…

Anyhow, I’m on three times this year:

What’s in the Labs at Georgia Tech?
Friday, 2:30 pm, Science track

Enter the Commercial Space Age
Sunday, 7:00 pm, Space track
with Michael Mealling

NASA Goes Commercial
Monday, 11:30 am, Space track
with Michael Mealling, John Bradford, A.C. Charania

I hope those of you attending can drag yourself away from the (admittedly incredible) entertainment programming and cross the pedestrian bridge from the Marriott to join us in the Hilton. My sessions are during family-friendly hours (i.e., not Saturday night), so bring your kids. Have a great con!

PS, for those who asked: My incredibly popular and thought-provoking talk on alternative energy (“Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas“) was apparently vetoed by Science track management this year as being insufficiently respectful to prevailing opinions, even though I filled the room last year, and there are empty slots on the schedule. C’est la guerre.

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World’s worst astrophotography: Jupiter and all 4 moons, via iPhone 4 and a 16″ Meade telescope!

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DragonCon: @mmealling and I prepare for our space startups talk

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Only at DragonCon!

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Crowd gathering for my 11:30 talk at DragonCon

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DragonCon starts next week!

Once again, I’ve been invited to speak in both the Space and Science tracks (which are over in the Hilton, across the street from the truly crazy stuff). I have three presentations:

What the Heck Happened to Our Space Program?
Friday, 11:30 am
Weren’t we supposed to be orbiting Jupiter by 2010? Some history of NASA’s highlights and lowlights, and why the proposed cancellation of the Constellation Project is good for sci-fi geeks who actually want to see exploration of space.

Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas
Friday, 4:00 pm
A discussion of alternative energy sources, their uses (or misuses), their limitations, and what to do about America’s addiction to fossil fuels.

Rise of the New Space Startups (with Michael Mealling)
Saturday, 11:30 am
President Obama’s new space policy effectively removes NASA from near Earth manned space flights & expects commercial space groups to fill the void. Can they do it?

Tear yourself away from the comic books and lightsabers, and come hang out with the real geeks of DragonCon!

PDFs of all three presentations will eventually be available here.

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Michael doesn’t blog very often, but when he does, he nails it. This President may be killing Constellation for all the wrong reasons. In fact, I doubt that this President truly realizes what doors he has opened here.

But, as the Vulcan proverb says, “Only Nixon could go to China.”

Only a Democrat President, with the glitz and glamour of JFK, could possibly have gotten this far in killing the hagiography of JFK’s space program. No Republican would have a chance.

NASA doesn’t work as a method of getting large numbers of humans (and cargo) into space reliably, repeatably, and cheaply. It can’t, because it wasn’t designed to. To quote Rand Simberg, “in response to the Soviet socialist state enterprise for space, we created one of our own.” And, like every socialist state enterprise in the history of mankind, NASA is crippled from inception.

Obama has proposed sweeping away all of the cruft that has accreted around NASA’s human space flight establishment and replacing it with private enterprise. After all, if a government employee needs to fly from Washington to San Francisco they don’t fly on a government airplane. (Well, unless they’re Nancy Pelosi.) They fly on Delta Air Lines, with a discount for volume purchases. Why should low Earth orbit be any different?

As a lifelong space enthusiast and long-time space investor, I’m absolutely thrilled. Because, as I never cease pointing out to people… I don’t support “the space program.” I support the space industry. And you have to kill the former to allow room for the new industry to breathe.

In the distant past of 2004, I testified in front of the Aldridge Commission. You can read my testimony here, or the commission’s final report here. The Obama Administration’s proposals are much closer to these free-market recommendations than anything the Bush Administration ever considered implementing.

This has to get past Congress, where there are a lot of entrenched special interests getting ready to fight for their pork barrel spending. And we could still screw it all up by insisting that NASA regulate the “safety” of its successors, when that’s properly the job of the Department of Transportation (specifically, AST). This isn’t a done deal. But, if Obama is successful, we’ll be able to mark 2010 as the year that we finally quit subsidizing a massive socialist Ministry of Space, and launched a multi-billion dollar American-led space industry.

Which, in the middle of all the bad economic news around us, sounds very very good indeed.

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