Minutes of January 2022 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met January 8, 2022 at the McMurray’s house in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending in person were Adam Hemphill, Clifford and Claire McMurray. John Northcutt, Tim Scott, Dave Sheely, and Syd Henderson. Robin Scott attended by Zoom. 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/Update2201.pdf so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
The Blue Origin New Shepard flight on December 11 was the first New Shepard spaceflight to carry a full complement of six, and the first to carry a parent and child (Lane and Cameron Bess), as well an carrying Alan Shepard’s daughter Laura Shepard Churchley. We watched a video of the flight as well as a view of the astronauts floating inside the capsule.
We watched the launch of the kamikaze spacecraft DART, which will crash into the moonlet asteroid Dimorphos that orbits Didymos.
The top twenty collision hazards are Russian upper stages.
To date 609 people have flown in space. I don’t know if this includes the Virgin Galactic flights.
We watched a video of the Tiangong space station second crew, including a video of Wang Yaping’s spacewalk. We also watched a video of Yusaka Maezawa, the space tourist on the ISS, who was doing a presentation for the home crowd on ISS space toilets. Apparently, this is part of a series of videos he and his one-man film crew did. (The Tiangong astronauts also do presentations, in their case for Chinese schoolchildren,)
NASA wants to have first commercial space station up by 2028 to avoid a space gap.
We watched a video of the release of the Webb Space Telescope, including the extension of the solar panels.
We need to get the sections of the annual report done by the next meeting so Tim can submit them.
We have $920.82 in the checking account and $267 in cash for a total of $1187.82.
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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