Minutes of June 14 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met June 14, 2025, at the Cyber Hall and Gaming Lounge at Norman Computers in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending in person were Clifford McMurray, Adam Hemphill, Tim Scott, and Syd Henderson, as well as visitor named Chuck. 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/Update2506.pdf, so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
For Starship 9, SpaceX took a more aggressive approach for the first stage, and it blew up after releasing its cargo. This was also the first attempt to reuse a first stage. The next two flights will happen quicker. [No, after the launch pad disaster during a test of Starship 10, no they won’t.-SFH]
Blue Origin’s transport to the Moon uses hydrogen and oxygen. They intend to test the Mark 1 lander later this year. It will be the largest spacecraft ever to land on the Moon. It will land three metric tons on the lunar surface.
Mark 2 will land thirty metric tons on the Moon. Mark 2 is not only much larger than Mark 1 but can be refueled on the lunar surface.
Near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa is one of seven known quasi-moons of the Earth. (A quasi-moon is temporarily ‘orbiting’ the Earth or another object but is too far away to be in a stable orbit and eventually goes on its way.)
The Chinese Tianwen-2 mission is not just visiting Kamoʻoalewa but will go on to visit the comet/asteroid 311P/PANSTARRS and investigate it.
The Chinese Long March 12 is designed to be reusable.
iSpace 2 had a payload to extract lunar material to see if they could claim it.
52 of SpaceX’s 72 launches this year were Starlink.
There are 4.2 parts per billion of helium-3 on the Moon, but that has error margin of 3.4 parts per billion, or 80%. In other words, it’s between 0.8 and 7.6 parts per billion. That is still far more common than on Earth, [where the ratio of helium-3 to helium 4 ranges from 2 to 12 parts per million. Since helium itself is rare in the Earth’s atmosphere, the amount of helium-3 is somewhere around four metric tons in the air. Helium-3 for human use is usually made in nuclear reactors, or by making tritium and waiting for it to decay.]
Voyager Space is buying up a lot of smaller space companies and aggregating them.
Dawn Aerospace’s spaceplane has so far only gone up to 25 km at 1 Mach but will eventually go up to 100 km. Cost is $100,000 per flight.
OSIDA has a contract with Dawn (their first!) and will hire Oklahomans to manage Dawn operations.
We watched a video featuring Elon Musk talking on Starship and Mars plans. He hopes to get up to 500 Starship launches in three or four years and eventually 1000. Since he’s been having trouble with it self-destructing, I don’t think that timeline is realistic.
We have $829.04 in the bank and $267 in cash for a total of $1096.04.
--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.
Copyright ©2025 by Oklahoma Space Alliance.