Minutes of May 2016 Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met at Earl’s Rib Palace in Moore on May 14, 2016. Attending were Steve and Karen Swift, Bryan Swift, Ross Davoren, Syd Henderson, Richard Holtzschue, Kip and Claire McMurray, Dave and Bill Sheely, Rosemary Swift, and Dennis Wigley, and a couple of people whose names I didn’t catch.
SpaceX nailed its second sea landing of a first stage, both of which were from orbital flights. They’d earlier made a soft landing at Cape Canaveral after a suborbital flight. We watched videos of all three landings, as well a video of a New Shepard landing from the viewpoint of a camera on its booster.
We watched a video on the Hubble Space Telescope’s 26th birthday showing off the Bubble Nebula.
We watched a video of Chris Vorhees of Planetary Resources’ talk at the Mars Society Conference. We have now discovered 600,000 asteroids including 10,000 Near Earth Objects. Seventeen percent of NEOs are energetically closer than the Moon. Materials we can claim for them are Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen (the four elements most essential for life in space), as well as the group 8 elements (iron, cobalt, nickel, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and platinum). All of these except iron are severely depleted in the Earth’s crust because they sank to the Earth’s core when the Earth was still molten. [Iron was also depleted to a certain extent, but it also forms compounds that stayed in the crust.—SFH]
We had $77.28 in expenditures in April, including the annual fee for our post office box, and reimbursement for the newsletter, leaving us with $1020.67 in the checking account and $207 in cash.
Next year’s ISDC is in St Louis. Moon Day is in Texas around July 20. Should we do a Mars Day? Syd suggested we could do one at Soonercon in 2017.
The Oklahoma Spaceport has received permission to do vertical launches.
--Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Note on OSIDA Meeting:
The June 2016 OSIDA meeting was cancelled.--Syd
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray.
PO Box 1003
Norman, OK 73070
Webmaster is Syd Henderson.
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