Meeting This Sunday May 27th

All:

Yes, time for another meeting, this Sunday, 6:30 PM, Spaghetti Warehouse, Plano, TX off of Rt 75 at the 15th street exit.

Mark and Tom have been working on getting a rover and camera for moon day, and we will have a demo this Sunday.  (Dan:  please if you don’t mind to bring your monitor to see if it will work with the camera).  Plans are coming together for a great presence at this year’s Moon Day!   And I hope to hear the latest regarding T-shirt designs, and any progress on our e-publishing efforts.

Kris and I are counting down to going to MDRS to help with the URC, and expect to have much to talk about when we return for our June meeting.  Note that our June meeting will be the LAST meeting before Moon day!!  Time flies!

Registration for the conventing is open, and we should have a great line up of speakers in JPL’s backyard.  MSL continues its flawless journey to the Red planet, so let’s hope it keeps up for the nail biting entry descent and landing this August!

And, of course, SpaceX did it!!! They launched Tuesday morning and are on their way to a hoped for (and i expect they will do it) docking with the Space Station Friday.  This is a very big moment for commercial space, space exploration, and our hopes for moving forward in space exploration.

See you all Sunday!

Kurt

SpaceX Falcon 9 Has Wings

If you’ve been paying any attention, you probably already know
that SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9/Dragon to the
space station this morning. If all continues to goes according to
plan, the Dragon will rendezvous and dock with the station on
Friday.

For what it’s worth I did stay up late and live tweet the Falcon
launch for DMS on our twitter page (was glad to do it:)

http://www.twitter.com/dallasmars

Mark

April 2012 Meeting Minutes

A few weeks late, but here are the meeting minutes for April, 2012:

We had productive and lively meeting, with 9 people attending.

Tom gave a brief on the results of the debate team’s trip to the final’s in New York. Tom’s wife Donna has been coached a local home schooled debate team regarding the role of manned space exploration. Our group has been helping along as we have seem these bright high school students rise up to the final 8 teams in the world and go to the finals in New York, an incredible achievement. Unfortunately, in New York they lost in the first round – luck must not have been with them this time. But we applaud how far they have got, and we all enjoyed the ride!

We also had a discussion of the Mars Society related materials owned by our late member, Roger Carr. It is Mimi’s wish to bequeath it to our Chapter: We discussed the legal aspects of this. Dan went over the material- ‘The Case for Mars’ books, convention T-shirts etc, and a Mars globe that will look great on our Moon Day table.

Tom showed us the banner and stand he had made using the design the Mark created. It is a stunning visual display, and will definitely give our table at Moon Day, the convention, or any other event (like our monthly meetings!) a distinctly professional and compelling appearance. As per the group’s approval, we reimbursed Tom for $100 towards the cost of the banner, and Tom picked up the rest of the cost (Thank you Tom!).

I talked about his annual talk at the SMU gifted boys program where he talked about Mars and Mars direct. The talk is always popular, and I had over 60 students attend in the afternoon session.

I also admitted that given my workload I will simply not be able give the time that it deserves to the book project of publishing all the past papers. I handed the CD’s over to Dan – Dan and Kris will work on organizing them now. Progress is slow but is still happening!

Plans were made for Tom and Mark to find a rover for Moon Day – according to the San Diego Chapter rovers are real attention getters both from the public and the media. Progress on that is promising and ongoing!

Kris and I confirmed that we will go out to MDRS to help with the University Rover Competition (it is now less than two weeks away!). This will the first time out to MDRS for the both of us.

Mark also took on working up a T-shirt design – the convention is coming, and a MSL themed T-shirt is sure to sell well this year.

Both Moon Day (July 21) and the Mars Society Convention (August 3 – 5) are coming up and registration for the convention is open!

till our next meeting on May 27!

Kurt