Minutes of June Meeting
Claire, Syd, Tom and John Northcutt met at the McMurrays' on June 20 to work on the Norman Public Library exhibit. This was a work meeting so the agenda was suspended. We continued working on the panels for the exhibit and began to organize a large number of clippings under various subjects, such as Mars and International Space.
We trimmed and organized the panels of “50 years in Space.” There were a considerable number of gaps in the series, including some major ones such as nearly all the Russian Luna Missions, the Gemini Program, and the Columbia and Challenger disasters. This is because the series ran for sixty issues and had only one article per week. The Columbia and Challenger disasters occurred during the same calendar week as the Apollo 1 fire, which is the one that was covered. Syd and Clifford McMurray identified gaps in the series to fill in and Syd agreed to create articles for those weeks.
Syd looked up the history of international space organizations such as the British Interplanetary Society and Group for the Study of Reactive Motion and brought articles on those. [See below for more meetings on the exhibit.]
Between Meetings Activities
On June 27, Claire McMurray, Syd Henderson and John Northcutt got together and continued to put together the exhibit. Syd had located pictures for nineteen important events that were not covered in the 50 Years in Space Series. There were: Ham the Chimp, Luna 1, 2, 3, 9 and 10, Mariner 2, 4 and 10, Alexey Leonov’s space walk, the first space rendezvous, the first space docking, the first space fatality (Vladimir Komarov), Apollo 8, the first Space Shuttle launch, the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and the first crew of the Space Station. [I’ll try to put these articles on the web site.] Syd had written articles for about half of these, and intended to bring the rest on Sunday and Monday. Syd discovered he had erroneously written that Luna 1, which had emitted a sodium vapor trial, was the first manmade object in space visible to the naked eye; that honor actually belongs to the rocket booster of Sputnik 1, [Sputnik itself was barely visible as well.] Syd and Claire worked on the exhibit on Sunday night and Monday daytime [at which time Syd brought the rest of the completed articles], and John and Claire on Monday Night. The exhibit was put up by John, Syd and Claire on July 1, except for a couple of panels which Claire put up on July 2.
Syd went to the Norman Public Library and took pictures of the exhibit.
--Minutes submitted by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
To contact Oklahoma Space Alliance, e-mail Syd Henderson.
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Norman, OK 73070
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