Minutes of March 8 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met March 8, 2025, at the Cyber Hall and Gaming Lounge at Norman Computers in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending in person were Clifford McMurray, Tom Koszoru, John Northcutt, Tim Scott, Dave Sheely, and Syd Henderson. OSA President Clifford McMurray presided over the meeting. Clifford did an Update discussing links to material covered in the meeting and this is online at https://osa.nss.org/Update2503.pdf, so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
Blue Ghost will observe the lunar eclipse. It also has a three-meter heat probe for analyzing the topmost layer of the lunar regolith.
The next Blue Ghost mission goes to the far side of the Moon.
Athena (Intuitive Machines' lunar lander) was 400 meters off-target and landed in a crater. They landed within a hundred miles of the lunar South Pole.
Lunar Trailblazer also lost contact. It may be tumbling.
The Janus probe is still in storage. It was on the IM-2 mission with Athena.
The engines of Starship’s second stage (itself called “ship’) shut down eight minutes after launch. This meant it had to self-destruct.
Astroforge’s Asteroid Prospector aboard the IM-2 mission was also lost. Theory is that it had trouble deploying its solar panels and may be tumbling. There will be a second probe next year that will go to the same asteroid the Asteroid Prospector was going to observe.
Blue Origin has a new CEO brought in to make things move faster.
Hydrogels, which are being studied as radiation shielding, are also used in contact lenses
“Iron Dome” (the name for the proposed ‘space shield’) was already trademarked by an Israeli company, hence the change of the name to “Golden Dome.” The Israeli Iron Dome, incidentally, is itself an air defense system.
The teams handling the Voyager space probes are hoping they can nurse the spacecraft along into the 2030s.
There are now 7000 Starlinks in orbit.
The Falcon 9 first stage that toppled over on March 2 was only on its first flight. There have been five Falcon 9 incidents within the last year.
SpaceX has enough funding to do vertical integration of its business (i.e., handling all aspects) but smaller companies do not.
We have $716.60 in our bank account and $267 in cash for a total of $983.60.
We watched videos of the Blue Ghost landing and IM-2 (Athena) landing. Since Blue Ghost landed near lunar dawn, we got a good view of the shadow of the spacecraft as it landed.
We watched a video of the Starship 8 launch. It went into a tumble when it was down to two engines.
We watched an Astroforge promotional video on asteroid mining.
--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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