Minutes of July 11 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met July 11, 2026, at Clifford McMurray’s house in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending were Adam Hemphill, Clifford McMurray, Dave Sheely, Chris Tayloe 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/Update2607.pdf so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
China is the first country outside of the United States to recover a first stage intact. China has a lot of rockets that are intended to be reuseable.
Launch pad 39B at Cape Canaveral is under construction so New Glenn will eventually be able to launch from there too. Jared Isaacman still thinks Blue Moon 1 can be launched by the end of the year. The explosion from the last test of a New Glenn lower stage shattered windows a mile from the pad.
Pegasus’s most recent flight was its 45th and will be the last. It was the first space mission for the rocket since 2019 (although there was a Space Force test in 2021). Cost of the LINK mission was $30 million. If the LINK mission is successful, it should give the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory another five years of life. We still don’t know how LINK is going to grab it.
Aeolus has a minimum lifetime of one Martian year to conduct its Martian atmospheric science investigations, according to NASA contract, but of course NASA has a history of extending the lifetime of missions.
Victus Haze was launched from New Zealand June 19 toward a target launched in May. It beat the previous readiness for launch by eleven hours.
Starfall is SpaceX’s answer to Varda’s space manufacturer satellite. Varda was the spacecraft that was having difficulty finding a place to land due to FAA regulations.
In 2016, mouse embryos were sent into space on China’s Shijian-10 microgravity satellite to test whether embryos consisting of a few cells would develop into blastocysts. In 2023 Japan did it as well, aboard ISS. Nobody has ever done a full mouse development in space.
The cost to the Artemis program of cancelled projects (because Artemis was revised) is $5.9 billion. This includes the adapter and launch tower. The latter increased in cost from $300 million to $2 billion. HALA went in cost from $187 million to $1.9 billion and wouldn’t have been delivered until 2031.
A Mars rover that is being repurposed as a lunar rover would still use a spare RTG.
The CubeSat which has a tiny RTG uses tritium but will also have solar panels.
China is putting manned and unmanned Moon programs under one organization.
JPL has been under Cal Tech since 1958.
The Orion capsule is too big for a Falcon Heavy but a modified Dragon could be carried for Moon missions. Nothing else currently flying is big enough to replace SLS (but upcoming rockets will be).
New Horizons went into hibernation last August. It’s gone 300 million miles since then and has been storing data all that time, now it’s ready to transmit it.
Previous billionaires wanting to book a trip to the Moon and beyond were Dennis Tito and Jared Isaacman. The latter is busy at the moment.
Vast is already building space station so why not use that technology to build satellites as well.
Star Catcher was the company that wants to beam solar power to other satellites.
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Minutes By OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Clifford Mcmurray
PO Box 1003
Norman, OK 73070
Webmaster is Syd Henderson.
Copyright ©2026 by Oklahoma Space Alliance.