Minutes to November 12 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met November 12, 2022, at the McMurray’s house in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending were Clifford and Claire McMurray. Dave Sheely, and Syd Henderson. OSA President Clifford (Kip) McMurray presided over the meeting He did an Update discussing links to material covered in the meeting and this is online at https://osa.nss.org/Update2211.pdf so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there. This was a shorter meeting than usual since our October meeting was postponed until October 22 (which also made the October meeting unusually long).
It looks like in a few years Long March will be making controlled reentries much to the relief on nations under the flight path. We watched the launch of the Mengtian module of the Tiangong space station. We also watched a video of China astronauts moving modules around Tiangong.
Dennis Tito, who with his wife Akiko have purchased two of the 12 seats on SpaceX’s second commercial lunar flight, will be at 82 years old the oldest astronaut to reach Earth orbit (surpassing John Glenn) let alone the oldest to fly to the Moon. (William Shatner is the oldest to reach space but that was on a suborbital flight. He was 90.)
We watched a video of the November 1 Falcon 9 launch and the landing of the two side boosters on a foggy day. They landed about a hundred yards and a few seconds apart.
We watched video of the launch of India’s GSLV Mark III rocket. Although this is currently being used to launch geosynchronous satellites, it will also be used to launch people into space.
The Stratolaunch carrier plane is called the Roc. We watched it do a captive carry of a Talon A hypersonic aircraft, although the first free flight of the Talon A won’t be until next year.
Asteroid AP7’s orbit crosses the Earth’s on the other side of the Sun [and is in a 5-1 resonant orbit with the Earth, so it doesn’t pose a threat to the Earth at present. Still, at a little more than a kilometer in length, it would produce quite an impact if its orbit shifts and it hits the Earth.
We went through an article on space warfare.
We went through several weeks of This Week at NASA. A Marsquake detected by InSight was caused by a meteor impact.
Lucy flew by Earth on its way to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids and snapped shots of the Earth and the Moon.
We have $907.41 in our bank account and presumably the usual $267 in cash.
The postal address of the National Space Society is changing to Florida on January 1. This needs to change in the newsletter and on our mailing list. Also, Syd needs to put the logo for ISDC 2023 on the website. Thss will be in Dallas-Frisco.
We renominated our officers for 2022 to serve in 2023: Clifford McMurray for President, Dave Sheely for Vice-president, Syd Henderson for Secretary, and Tim Scott for Treasurer (pending his approval).
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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