Minutes of January 10 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met January 10, 2026, at the Cyber Hall and Gaming Lounge at Norman Computers in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending were Clifford McMurray, Adam Hemphill, Dave Sheely, and Syd Henderson. 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 https://osa.nss.org/Update2601.pdf so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
Next month Blue Origin will tell us what they intend to do with New Glenn.
The Escapade Mars orbiters will leave their halo orbits around the Earth-Sun L2 point for Mars on November 26 and arrive there in 2027. Adam thinks they are in a long elliptical orbit that approaches Earth at perigee [which would make sense because they could use Earth as a gravitational Slingshot.
Jared Isaacman (the new NASA Administrator) has ninety days to identify programs that atr more than thirty percent overdue or thirty percent over budget.
Congress has agreed on a $24 billion NASA budget compared to the $18.8 billion proposed. This includes restoring much of the science budget but not the Mars Sample Return mission.
The Tiangong Space Station crew did an eight-hour spacewalk to inspect the damage to Shenzhou 20, which is still attached to Tiangong. [It returned on January 19.]
Elon Musk was reluctant to have SpaceX go public since it might interfere with his Mars plans The public offering the largest in history.
A University in Japan sent up moss samples up to the ISS and 80% percent survived but with a bit less chlorophyll. There is a potential of 5600 days survival to exposure to space.
Yuri’s launchpad was mothballed because of lack of funds. [Which I guess is why it’s not available for crewed Soyuz missions.]
A Chinese citizen of Canada was arrested for surveying Cape Canaveral by drone and a Chinese naturalized American citizen was arrested for taking photographs at Vandenburg.
Mars Odyssey will run out of fuel within the next two years. We are approaching a shortage of Mars relay satellites, but the current NASA budget has $300 million allocated for communications satellites around Mars.
By 2030 the risk that an aircraft will collide with falling space debris is 1%. [Over what time frame? I assume this is for all aircraft together, not individually!]
The record for the number of uses for a SpaceX booster is 32.
The ISS astronauts who were abruptly returned in January [because a crew member had a medical problem] was to return in February anyway, so were through five-sixths of their mission.
We watched a video of the November New Glenn launch and booster landing.
We watched a video on the odyssey of Snoopy, the Apollo 10 LEM, which is still orbiting the Sun and occasionally comes to visit Earth. Snoopy started orbiting the Sun in 1969, passed Earth in 1984 and (probably) in 2018. It is in the orbital plane of the Earth and will return again in 2028.
We watched a 60 Minutes Australia interview with Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams on their experiences on the Starliner Crew test mission and their stay on the ISS.
--Minutes By OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Clifford Mcmurray
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