Minutes of June Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance held its regular monthly Meeting on June 10 at Earl’s Rib Palace in Moore, Oklahoma. Attending were Steve and Karen Swift, Chris Crawford, Ross Davoren. Tom Koszoru, Claire and Clifford McMurray, John Northcutt, Norman (didn’t get last name), Dave Sheely, Brian Swift, Rosemary Swift, and Syd Henderson. OSA President Steve Swift presided over the meeting.
This was the first meeting after the International Space Development Conference in Saint Louis. Claire, Clifford, Dave, Syd and Tim Scott went to the conference and the first four shared their experiences. I’ll be going through my experiences in some detail later on, but I mentioned a Japanese student experiment to launch a ring-shaped solar power collector that would light up a ring-shaped satellite in time for the Tokyo Olympics. [Ed Strickland and I worked out that this would be visible as a tiny ring, not a point of light. This talk was actually part of a student contest on designing and using solar power satellites, and what the Japanese are doing are modular SPSs.] I also attended plenary sessions by Professor Johann-Dietrich Wörner, the Director-General of the European Space Agency, by Space Pioneers, one on high altitude ballooning, and dinner talks by Professor Wörner, by representatives of the Kepler Team, and the Awards banquet. I also commented on METI, a relative of SETI in which we deliberately broadcast to other civilizations so they can come eat us (or make friends).
Dave went to the Space Medicine track, which considered questions as to how exposure to 25 seconds of zero-G affects plants. Robert Zubrin and a Dr. Rhodes have diametrically opposed views on the magnitude of the radiation threat in long-term space travel and colonization.
Claire took “Greening the Galaxy.”
One person wants to build a ring around the Pacific Ocean, then expanding it by running a current through it so it surrounds the planet (apparently fixed through magnetic support).
Two people from Japan are running the Japanese equivalent of the Zero-G corporation.
Claire’s reading a book on the Universe as a Hologram. The entire Universe is a giant hologram because on the atomic level every bit contains information about the rest.
Kip went to the Space Solar Power track on Friday. Gary Barnhard is trying to get a cubesat as a technology that would beam power to a module. We could have a mothership taking a bunch of cubesats to explore asteroids. We will be using 100 gigawatts of Space Solar Power by the end of the 21st Century.
One speaker on METI wants to beam out the structure of our DNA to the stars so we can be constructed.
On the Public/Private panels. There are six hundred million tonnes of water at the North Pole of Mars. [Syd: this is the mass of six hundred billion liters.]
Public/Private collaboration has less regulation but some oversight.
We can have people on the moon in five to seven years for a tenth of NASA’s cost. Estimate to construct a Lunar base is 10 billion dollars
One speaker (Wingo?) wants a 25 year tax holiday for items produced in space.
China is spending a trillion dollars on something called the New Silk Road, and now effectively owns the Greek port of Piraeus.
Kip was running the Space Business track on Saturday so didn’t see much else.
Exos Aerospace has reassembled the Armadillo Aerospace team back and much of the equipment.
Soon 1500 satellites will be launched per year.
If you assemble your satellite in orbit, you don’t have to overbuild it to survive the stresses of launch. A suggestion is to do modular construction of satellites on the Space Station.
A 40 by 80 kilometer box in geosynchronous orbit now holds seven satellites.
Buzz Aldrin’s son is a college professor working on an MBA program to promote space startup companies. This would compete with the International Space University.
Michael Snyder from Made in Space 3-D manufacturer said 82% of failures on the Space Station were of parts that can probably be manufactured through 3-D printing on the Space Station.
Fiber optics manufactured in space are notably faster than those manufactured on Earth.
On Sunday, Kip went to the Asteroid Track. First talk was on the OSIRIS-REx mission to the carbonaceous asteroid Bennu. Bennu is one of the darkest asteroids; we want to collect sixty grams of material, searching for amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.
Joel Sircel wants to build a bag to surround an asteroid so he can bake off ice.
Bob Zubrin had a talk on the radiation and planetary protection rackets. Any biological hazards from Mars would already have affected Earth from Mars rocks. [Given the number of mass extinctions in Earth’s history, this may not be comforting as it sounds, though there are simpler explanations.]
OSA Business: Craig Crawford paid for a membership for two years.
Oklahoma Space Alliance member Peggy McBride passed away.
Land and uranium weren’t resources until we found ways to use them. People create resources.
NASA could create a base on Mars, but how do you create a civilization? How does it support itself?
We looked at bios of the twelve newly selected astronauts.
Update has a link to space launches.
--Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray.
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