Minutes of October Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met October 8 at the Koszoru house. Attending were Tom and Heidi Koszoru, Steve Swift, David Sheely, James and Vicky Trombly, Claire McMurray, John Northcutt and Syd Henderson.
The deal on the movie that SEDS purchased with the money we gave them for last year’s Yuri’s Night was that we could borrow it if we needed it for a presentation. It does belong to SEDS.
Cliff sent a lot of links from Space.Com.
John and Tom will get together to work on the logo. Syd will keep working on Leigh to complete her version.
Tom and Heidi’s dog Suzy died of cancer on September 11. Suzy was a fixture at OSA meetings for many years.
Tom cannot go to ISDC in 2012 since it’s his mother-in-law’s birthday and he will be in Germany.
Tom has twenty CD’s on Solar Power from the 2009 International Space Development Conference.
Jim reported that the Senate Appropriations Committee has approved .5 billion dollars for Commercial Space, split between four companies (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and XCor).
Claire needs someone to take over Update, the e-mail newsletter we send out in even months. Claire will be having knee surgery on both knees.
SpaceX has announced that they are developing a fully reusable vertical launch-vertical landing space vehicle. This will be a refinement of the Dragon capsule which does land in water.
Jim did a report on Karl Jansky, the father of radio astronomy. Jansky was born in Norman in 1905 in what was then Oklahoma Territory. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1927 with a degree in Physics and joined Bell Telephone Labs in 1928. While investigating causes of static in radio voice transmission, Jansky detected a type of static that repeated once a day, which at first he thought was the Sun, but he eventually caculated that the period was one sidereal day, and worked out that it was coming from the center of the Milky Way, in the constellation Sagittarius.
Jim wants someone to carry on his series of Dragon updates after the end of the year.
Steve: At the last meeting we mentioned that young people don’t seem to be interested in space. We exchange information among ourselves, but not so much with the general public.
Tom: We should contact a speaker’s bureau. Oklahoma University has such a program.
Steve: Perhaps speakers from companies based in Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics is located in Oklahoma City.
There is a Rotary Park building on Boyd that belongs to the City of Norman. We could host speakers there.
On Moon Day 2012, NSS-North Texas does something with local schools. Moon Day is the closest Saturday to July 20.
Oklahoma Space Alliance may have to be open to moving the meetings to third weekend when there is bad weather on meeting days.
--Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
OSIDA Notes
The Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority met on October 12 at the Oklahoma Department of Transportation building in Oklahoma City. Board members present were Jack Bonny, Lou Sims, Phil Kliewer and Darryl Murphy. There were three in the audience, not including OSIDA executive director Bill Khourie and his legal assistant. Syd Henderson attended on behalf of Oklahoma Space Alliance. Ken Ruffin, the President of NSS-North Texas was in town and attended on the behalf of his organization. The third audience member was Dan Seesholtz of the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Capt. Seesholtz is governor of the UAS council.
Former State Senator Gilmer Capps, who is also on the OSIDA board, suffered a mild heart attack and wasn’t able to attend.
Bill Khourie introduced Richard Hart, who will be holding the position of Facility Manager at the Oklahoma Spaceport. Mr. Hart has had extensive experience in law enforcement in Elk City over thirty years. He also was a musician who toured with Mel Torme. How this relates to being a Spaceport facility manager wasn’t clear to me.
The FAA will indeed have the Commercial Space Advisory Committee meeting in Oklahoma City’s Mike Monroney Center in January.
OSIDA has sent out 120 copies of their promotional video.
The OSIDA Board voted to approve an expenditure not to exceed $30,000 to develop a new interactive OSIDA web page. This appears to have already started because the OSIDA web page is “Under Construction.”)
The Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority meeting that was scheduled for November 9 has been cancelled.
--Notes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray
PO Box 1003
Norman, OK 73070
Webmaster is Syd Henderson.
Copyright �2011 Oklahoma Space Alliance.