Meeting Notes for September 2010

All:

8 members attended this September’s meeting, including Roger and Mimi! It was great to see old friends again!

We talked about the Senate bill and NASA funding, which looks both positive and negative. The positive side is that for the first time since the 60’s the main NASA funding bill has actual funding in it for development of a heavy lift booster, which is essential to getting humans to Mars. The negative, of course, is the standing down of NASA’s manned space capabilities, and a fuzzy, uninspiring manned asteroid mission goal, with Mars, once again, off in the distant future. But, in some ways, we are getting closer: when the Mars Society started, there were no plans to send humans out of low earth orbit; then came Bush’s plan to send humans to the moon; now Obama wants to send them to an asteroid. Maybe next they’ll finally get it right and go for Mars!

We talked about some near term planning activities for the 2011 convention. One need is for flyers to give to the NSS to hand out at their many outreach activities.

Action items:

  • Kurt to open boxes received from the Dayton chapter and look for national flyers. (I did – there were none, but a lot of neat office supplies that will help during the convention)
  • Ask National for National organization flyers.
  • Work to update the current local chapter flyers – Kurt to supply Mark with words for update

We also talked over themes and slogans. The general consensus was that as a theme we should emphasize the opening up of settlement and a new frontier rather than a 1st landing. This builds on our western frontier heritage and on our desire to avoid an Apollo boom and bust flags and footprints scenario. I’ll send out slogans for discussion in a separate e-mail.

There was some discussion that the next meeting occurs on Halloween, creating a conflict with some members, but we didn’t reach a consensus on moving the meeting day.

See you next month!

Kurt

Leave a Reply