Minutes to July 10, 2021 Oklahoma Space Alliance meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance chapter of National Space Society had its regularly scheduled meeting on July 10, 2021, at the McMurray residence. Attending David Sheely, Russ Davoren, Adam Hemphill, Tom and Heidi Koszoru, Clifford McMurray, and Syd Henderson. We had no attendees by Zoom this time. Dave Sheely had suffered an injury so Clifford 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/Update2107.pdf, so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
We watched a video of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo launch which was upcoming the day after the meeting. This was going to be the first launch into space from New Mexico.
We watched a video on Jeff Bezos, who is going into space on July 20. Mercury 13 selectee Wally Funk, who is going to be a passenger on that launch, also has a ticket for Virgin Galactic so may go up twice. We watched a video with Jeff Bezos and Wally Funk.
We watched a video on the Unity astronauts. [Unity’s the Virgin Galactic spaceplane.] We also watched a video from the Today show about Richard Branson.
We watched a video of the launch of a cargo module to Tienhe, the core module for China’s space station, then the launch of three astronauts to Tienhe, followed by their spaceship, Shenzhou 12, docking and their first spacewalk. Kip commented that this was the first time there have been two space stations in orbit at the same time since Mir came back to Earth. He doesn’t count Tiangong-1 and 2, which were admittedly much smaller and less capable than Mir or the ISS and the upcoming Tiangong 3, and were really demos for the major Chinese space station they’re building now. [I do count them so for me we had two space stations in 2016. However, Tiangong-3 is a different order of magnitude and will be inhabited long-term.]
We watched an animated video of the landing of the Zhurong Mars Rover.
We watched the fifth and successful launch of Starship, SN15, and-its landing. I note there is still a small exhaust fire on landing.
We watched a video on the Canadian robot arm that was hit by a piece of space debris. Function of the robotic arm was not affected, though the puncture is obvious. [Note: The European Space Agency launched a robotic arm on July 23 This will service the new Russian module Nauka. There’s also a Japanese robotic arm, so we have an “arms race” in space.]
We watched a video on Venus robots.
Syd attended the Chapters Assembly on June 26 and commented on a resolution of complaint there that the Chapters Assembly meeting was mentioned nowhere on the virtual ISDC site or schedule.
Since it was closing in on 5:00, we didn’t do a video this time.
Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
--Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray.
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