Minutes of February 2020 Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met at the McMurrays’ house in Norman, Oklahoma on February 8, 2020. In attendance were Clifford and Claire McMurray, Adam Hemphill, Tim Scott, Dave Sheely, Rosemary Swift, Steve Swift, Joe (didn’t get last name) and Syd Henderson. OSA President Clifford McMurray presided over the meeting. He also did an Update with links to the online videos he presented. This can be found online at http://osa.nss.org/Update2002.pdf so I’ll just cover the highlights.
We watched a video of the sections of the State of the Union address on the new Space Force and the Artemis project.
The House of Representatives authorization bill would extend ISS to 2028 rather than 2024.
Companies involved in commercial space don’t like NASA keeping control of the Moon Landing.
We watched the SpaceX abort test and the landing of the capsule. Since the abort test was successful, SpaceX is on track to start sending astronauts to the International Space Station.
We watched a video on Space Debris.
We watched several episodes of This Week at NASA.
The first class of Artemis astronauts has graduated.
The Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that IC 1101 is the largest known galaxy. It is a billion light years away and has a radius of two million light-years and a mass of 100 trillion suns. [In comparison, the Milky Way has a radius not more than a hundred thousand lightyears and a mass no more than 1.5 trillion times that of the Sun.] The giant galaxy has been nicknamed the Godzilla Galaxy. I was going to say that Hubble discovered it, but IC 1101 was discovered in 1790 by William Herschel, although it wasn’t revealed to be a galaxy until sometime around 1932.
We watched a video on the history of Chinese launch vehicles.
We currently have $936.93 between the cash box and the bank account.
--Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray.
PO Box 1003
Norman, OK 73070
Webmaster is Syd Henderson.
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