August 2009 Meeting Minutes

September 13, 2009 by Gregory Tucker.

We had a good meeting on August 30th, with 11 people in attendance, including our two drop in Korean guests!  And thanks to Tom and Ian for coming by again!

We went over the Mars Society convention, with us selling 38 out of 41 T-shirts, yielding $950 total sales.  We’ll be looking forward to a September report from Dan on how much we netted and what our bank account balance is.

The Mars Blitz went well, including April giving the literal elevator talk to her Representative, Chet Edwards (D-17th) in person.  We probably provided a welcome break from the throngs of pros and cons lobbyists on health care that were going through the halls.

I talked with Pat Czarnik about the Dallas Chapter being the official T-shirt provider for next year’s convention, and her reply was ’sure, but we need to give first dibs to the hosting chapter, but if they don’t want to, you can do it’  this would be good since this means that we could get pre-orders at registration.

Speaking of which, the next convention is in Dayton Ohio.  Looking forward to a good side trip to the Air Force Museum!  And Pat dropped some pretty good hints that Dallas might be the logical place for the 2011 convention…..a topic for thought…

The Tempo3 artificial gravity demonstrator is going forward with a balloon drop demo plan, but there may be other possbilities….

The Perry Middle School wants us and NSS back for next year, and we talked about possibly making a donation towards their station mockup.

And Dr. Cho and his co-worker Mr. Kwan (?) dropped in to talk about their new special rare earth compound of high temperature alloy for space applications..their talk certainly a first for our local chapter.

There was much talk about the Augustine commission and their upcoming report…as of this writing it sounds pessimistic but not terrible…basically that Man to Mars is the only logical ultimate goal for human space flight, but there is not the money to get there directly.  The recommendations coming out seem to be leaning towards eaither moon first or a ‘flexible’ plan that means cruising the inner solar system but not actually landing anywhere, with stretchouts to accomodate budget realities.  I’m sure we’ll have a better understanding by Sept 27, our next meeting…..

See you all then!

Kurt

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