Minutes of June Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance chapter of National Space Society had its regularly scheduled meeting on June 13. However, due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we held the meeting online via Zoom. Attending the meeting were Clifford and Claire McMurray, Dave Sheely, Tim Scott, Robin Scott and Syd Henderson. Robin, who is the chapters correspondent for NSS Downlink, attended from Alabama. OSA president Clifford McMurray presided over the meeting. He did an Update discussing links to material covered in the meeting and this is online at http://osa.nss.org/Update2006.pdf. We initially were going to have to meet for forty minutes, then take a break and return later, because of time limit on free Zoom meetings, but Zoom extended our limit during the meeting.
Since this was our first online meeting, there were a few glitches getting videos to play. We had to listen to a video tour of Endeavour (the SpaceX Crew Dragon that was their first manned launch), but later got the video to play and watch it again. I watched the docking and knew that there was a glittery stuffed dinosaur aboard and was glad to be introduced.
Starlink now has 422 satellites in orbit. There will be thousands by the time SpaceX completes the network. If you count backups, it’s tens of thousands.
Dave reported on the OSIDA meeting. They are meeting online for the same reasons we are. Craig Smith is the new Executive Director, replacing Bill Khourie, who had been Executive Director for a couple of decades.
Sixteen years after SpaceShipOne went into space, we still do not have commercial manned spaceflight.
We now have $672.94 in the checking account and $267 in the cash box, for a total of $939.94.
Robin is doing info gathering for NSS Downlink. I put her on our mailing list and sent her Outreach and Update.
We discussed whether to keep using Zoom. [There was concern about them blocking a Hong Kong blogger who wanted to do a memorial on the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese government asked (probably demanded) that they do so. Kip investigated other hosting sites, and they all seemed to have feet of clay.]
--Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray.
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