Monthly Meeting May 26, 6:30PM at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Plano

All,

Yes, another month has gone by, and our next monthly meeting is coming up. We will meet at the Spaghetti Warehouse at 6:30pm in Plano this coming Sunday, May 26 – same as usual!

We have a number of activities and news to discuss;

  • The URC is coming up that week! I leave May 28 to volunteer. We have a record number of teams and the new obstacle course! it should be the most exciting and best URC yet!
  • Mark hit 10,000 re-tweats for the Dallas chapter!
  • The Mars Society national convention, to be held in Boulder in August, is lining up an incredible array of speakers. Those who are planning to go, make your plans!
  • Moon day is coming upon us quickly, and Tom has a number of exciting ideas to make our presence even better than last year.
  • Speaking of conferences, it is coming time to talk about our T-shirt order. We decided at the last meeting to use the convention logo for our design. Now Mark needs to turn it into an actual T-shirt design, and we need to think about how many to order. April A said that she should be at the convention with some students, and they can help us man the T-shirt table in turn for help selling some MDRS cookbooks. Deal!

In national news, both Opportunity and Curiosity safely made it past conjunction and regained contact. Opportunity, deep into its 10th year on Mars, has logged over 22 miles, surpassing the 40 year old distance record of Apollo 17 (which they did it in three days, but…). (The lunakhod 2 lunar rover still holds the extra-terrestial record of 23 miles)

And, closer to home and nearer to Mars, the Explore Mars ‘Humans 2 Mars’ summit held May 6-8 had a variety of major space figures openly calling for NASA’s main manned space priority to be a manned mission to touch down on Mars within 20 years. This is the first time that a time-bound manned mission to Mars was discussed as NASA’s next main goal so openly by such senior government policymakers. We are getting closer all the time to national policy finally coming around to where it belongs: mankind’s next step is Mars!

See you Sunday!

Kurt