Victor Koman

... is the guest speaker scheduled for the 134th meeting of the Karl Hess Club, to convene on August 15, 2005.

Victor Koman on "What Goes Up...Could Stay There: The Coming Boom in Space Tourism"

Program includes a screening of Spacescape: Developing the Orbital Community as a Result of Commercialized Space Travel, a short video by John Marshall of Alien Irwin Productions.

Ready to book your weightless holiday at the L-5 Hilton? Feel like a little one tenth "G" workout on the Von Braun Ring Station, where it seems like you can walk on water -- because you can? How about a round of golf at the Old Shepard Course at the Marriott Resort in Luna City?

Thanks to Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, the creator of SpaceShipOne, and Richard Branson of Virgin Enterprises, the above scenarios are in the foreseeable future. And significantly, they claim it can happen without governmental funding.

Rutan and Branson have formed Virgin Galactic, a for-profit passenger spaceline which will utilize a craft called SpaceShipTwo* to carry two pilots and seven passengers into space for personal entertainment, i.e., tourism.

KHC's own Victor Koman will explain how these developments will impact the way we regard the universe, as well as the old world we leave behind.

John Marshall's video portrays what a space resort might look like, and points up, in a clever and amusing way, some potential problems.

So velcro up your magnetic boots, adjust your oxygen mixture, and float on over for a (not quite) down- to-earth discussion of a sky high subject!

* Paul Allen of Microsoft was a major financier of SpaceShipOne.

About Victor Koman

A native Californian, Victor Koman's books include the millennial-noir novel, The Jehovah Contract, and his medical thriller Solomon's Knife. Both novels won the Prometheus Award in their respective years.

Ray Bradbury says: "The Jehovah Contract has a fascinating concept, imaginatively delivered ... Would that there were a dozen more writers like [Koman] in the field.'

The Jehovah Contract has been optioned by producer-director Robert Meyer Burnett (Free Enterprise, Agent Cody Banks).

Koman's short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, Weird Menace, The King is Dead: Tales of Elvis Post-Mortem, the second & third Dark Destiny collections, and Free Space.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction calls his third Prometheus-winning novel, Kings of the High Frontier, "an intriguing, exhilarating, thought-provoking and, yes, sprawling novel that brings back the sense of wonder that drew so many of us into science-fiction in the first place." The novel was the first book published exclusively on the Internet to win the Prometheus award.

His latest novels are Captain Anger: The Microbotic Menace and Death's Dimensions.

A community activist with a quixotic sense of what's important, Koman was instrumental in preventing the destruction of Disneyland's last bubble-topped Mark III monorail ("Old Red"), generating a one-man public relations campaign that resulted in nationwide news coverage. The Walt Disney Company subsequently saved, restored, and converted the historic monorail fuselage into a street-legal promotional vehicle.

Koman develops dynamic-database websites utilizing Oracle and ColdFusion (the markup language, not the scientific fraud). He lives in southern California with his wife, Veronica, daughter, Vanessa, and cat, Kali. He graduated summa cum laude from Redlands University in 2001 with a B.S. in Information Systems. In 2004, he received his MBA from Pepperdine University. He's worked as an extra in several films. His weblog is Koman Sense.

ADDENDUM: David Harmon took these images at the above meeting.