ISDC

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We encourage you to attend ISDC, May 28-31, 2009, in Orlando, FL, USA.

The OpenLuna has an affiliation with ISDC. For more info:


28th International Space Development Conference


Dear Friends, The National Space Society's 28th annual International Space Development Conference, ISDC 2009, online registration closes Sunday, May 24. Onsite registration is higher. Register at http://www.isdc2009.org/node/60 today to guarantee your seat at the luncheons and dinners

ISDC has an impressive line-up speakers from NASA to Commercial Space, from Apollo astronauts to Shuttle astronauts. Make sure you check out the growing list of speakers http://www.isdc2009.org/speakers and the program grid http://www.isdc2009.org//programming

REGISTER TODAY today for the citizen space conference of the year!


I attended! Navigaiter wrote an article about what I heard there"


Online Secondary Meal Registration is also closing SUNDAY! Meal tickets for ISDC 2009 are on sale now at http://www.isdc2009.org/secondary_registration

ISDC registration is a la carte. One low registration rate permits admission into all general sessions. Meals are purchased separately. Professional Rate Registration includes all meals. After Sunday, tickets to meals are strictly limited and may not be available. The only way to guarantee at seat at a meal is to register by SUNDAY. Projected Keynote Speaker Schedule for Meals (subject to change): Thursday Luncheon:

   Elon Musk, Co-founder of PayPal and Space Exploration Technologies

Thursday Dinner:

   Richard Garriott, Sixth private citizen to conduct a space mission

aboard the ISS Friday Luncheon:

   Janet Petro, Deputy Director, NASA Kennedy Space Center

Friday Gala Dinner:

   Rusty Schweickart, Apollo 9 Astronaut and Chairman, B612 Foundation

Saturday Luncheon:

   Dr. Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 Astronaut; Founder, ShareSpace

Foundation; NSS Governor Saturday Dinner:

   John Mankins, President, Space Power Association

Purchase your tickets now at http://www.isdc2009.org/secondary_registration before it is too late!


Navigaiter attended this convention and wrote an article on it. Here it is for dear OpenLuna pioneers. Buzz Aldrin in "The Age of Space" by Allen Meece

Growing up on Air Force bases in the nineteen-fifties,

I had the Space travel expectations of most post-war kids. We

had seen wartime leaps of technology and we logically expected

them to jump into the “Conquest of Space” but that conquest

became a cruel sham of a show. Why would kids want and even need, to go to Space? (I

capitalize the word Space because it’s a realm of its own.)

Because it was the source of great fiction and movies. It

offered adventure and discovery on a new frontier where the old

rules were passé and where we could make our own rules. We

weren’t looking for new materials for earthbound advertisers,

we were looking to have fun and enjoy a meaningful, cutting

edge lifestyle. And yes, we wanted to escape the surly bonds of

conservative earthbound society. 	

In 1961, President Kennedy said words which started a

real Space program and which still excite us space buffs; “We

choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other

things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,

because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best

of our energies and skills…” In other words, we choose to go to

Space because we think we can. The statement was the precursor

to President Obama’s powerful simple motto of hope, “Yes we

can.” The Apollo Program began in 1961. Our dreams began

happening. Majestic rockets called Saturns began launching from

Cape Canaveral. The miracle happened in 1969: A human being

walked on the moon. We could look up at the night sky and say

“There’s people on the moon but you can’t see them even with

binoculars. They’re a quarter of a million miles away.”

A quarter of a million miles beyond all other humans. Space got

smaller. Six more lunar flights followed the immortal flight of

Apollo 11 and its crew of Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and

Michael Collins. (Buzz’s actual first name is Edwin but don’t

tell him I told you.) We're off to the races. We were happy to understand

that soon we would enjoy CATS, the acronym for Cheap Access To

Space. We assumed that NASA, (National Aeronautics and Space

Administration, hereinafter referred to as nasa, since it

doesn’t deserve the respect of capital letters and its acronym

has evolved into a word which is defined as “1, duping the

public on an astronomical scale“, or, “2. altering the course

of human destiny without the humans knowing it“), is on our

side and therefore space travel will get better and cheaper and

will follow a normal trajectory of improvement. Uh oh. You know

what happens when one assumes something. It makes an ass out of

u and me. Then, along comes a president called Richard Milhouse

Nixon. (“Millstone Nixon,” he could be called). Demonic Politics joins and delays The Quest for Space

as President Nixon symbolically kills President Kennedy, again,

by killing a space program that was working. “Tricky Dick”

slashes nasa’s budget to less than that it was before Apollo

moon flights. The manned space flight program is hurt so much

that it remains frail into the next century. Two Saturn V

rockets were actually abandoned on the assembly line and were

given away as Space flight souvenirs. These grounded

exhibitions of Nixon’s meanness were sent to the Kennedy Space

Center in Florida and to the Johnson Space Center near Houston

Texas. Nasa became a political supplicant with one hand

outstretched and the other holding its hat as it asked for

money and tried to please every political breeze. It started a

public relations circus that told us it was the gateway to the

stars and told us to be good little boys and girls and study

hard so that one day we could become astronauts while it was

forced to become The Gatekeeper of Space. Nasa canceled,

(or was forced to cancel by hostile congressmen or competitive

aerospace conglomerates), good projects such as the X-38 Crew

Return Vehicle, a lifting body spacecraft which was sponsored

by the European Space Agency as a little twenty-seven-foot,

all-around useful and economical space ship. Nasa canceled that

little space boat for those reasons but blamed it on the tired

alibi of budget constraints. Somebody didn’t want a bunch of

civilians running around the “high ground” of outer space. Nasa

canceled the SpaceHab, a marvelous inflatable habitation

structure where people could live in Space. Somebody didn’t

want civilians living in the future battleground of Space. But

nasa said otherwise. “It’s the budget, stupid,” went the

perennial lie. The money was there. It just went to other things that

wouldn’t lower the cost of Space access. Things like the

oxymoronic “space shuttle.” Originally claiming it would

“shuttle” off to space every month or better, nasa’s lucky to

get off the ground every couple of months. Their orbital ticket

to ride costs at least ten thousand dollars a pound and that

ain’t CATS, it's more like COPS, COrporate Profit from Space.

It's SpaceProfit for two giant quasi-monopolies, MacBoeing and

LockMart. It keeps us on the ground. In 2009, nasa has a “Vision for Space” program with

hardware that is similar to that the 1969 Apollo program. Also

in 2009, Richard Branson, an adventurous long-distance balloon

pilot and brilliant entrepreneur, started an actual spaceline

and said on his website; “Virgin Galactic is the world's first

spaceline. Giving you the groundbreaking opportunity to become

one of the first ever non-professional astronauts. Virgin

Galactic will own and operate its privately built spaceships,

modeled on the remarkable, history-making SpaceShipOne.” The mother ship, a fly back booster for the actual

SpaceShipTwo, which will take the passengers into space, has

been test-flying since July 2008. The man’s for real. At his

company’s website you can make a ten percent down payment

towards the $200,000 flight to space which could take place

within a few years. Don’t laugh, two hundred and fifty people

have already laid their money down.

The International Space Development Conference took

place on May 28 in Orlando. It’s an annual meeting of the

National Space Society, NSS, a non-profit Space activist

company I belong to. We moan and wheedle for Cheap Access to

Space, CATS. We’re glad that the civilian SpaceShipOne hopped

into Space in 2004 to win the Ansari X-prize but that’s not the

same as getting into orbit where Space voyages begin. Two Space activist war horses, Bob Zubrin, The Mars

Society president and Buzz Aldrin, second person on the moon,

were speakers at the conference. Referring to two classic science fiction movies, one

predicting commercialized cannibalism and the other, endless

adventure, Zubrin predicted that “We will either have a

‘Soylent Green‘ future or a ‘Star Trek‘ future.” Bob‘s reason for settling Mars goes beyond NASA’s wimpy

economic justification. (NASA is hereinafter referred to as

nasa, since their performance doesn’t warrant capital letters

and their acronym has evolved into a noun meaning “a group that

fools everybody“). Bob fiercely claimed, “America was settled

for hope, not for greed. We’re going to Mars not to give the

world more Teflon but to give the world more freedom!” Buzz Aldrin knows the political nature of the Conquest

of Space and has coined a phrase to describe what must occur

before nasa can help CATS. He remembers the vast difference

between Presidents Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon. “My ‘Six-P‘ law

proclaims that there is a -- Prerequisite Presidential Pathway

for Permanent Planetary Presence.” Luckily, Barak Obama favors a vigorous Space policy. Buzz uses his renown to inspire others. He quotes T.S.

Eliot: “Only those who risk going too far can find out how far

one can go.” Buzz’s motto is “Impossible is do-able.” Buzz loves the moon as much as anyone but he has to

disagree with nasa’s short-sighted emphasis on building lunar

infrastructure. “Nasa’s new vision of space access is a dead end,” Buzz

says. “The moon is dead. It’s uninhabitable. It may be a way

station to Mars but don’t repeat Apollo. Instead, enable a new

Space homesteading. Let the next generation make a history of

their own.” Space fans love hardware, the Space enabler. There

would be no Star Trek if there were no “Enterprise.” Buzz is

still in love with Space travel and he knows the hardware. His

wisdom, experience and intelligence, (he holds a doctorate in

celestial mechanics from M.I.T.), certifies the truth that we

should be making “Fly-back boosters and lifting body spacecraft

and fuel tanks that can be taken into space for making

habitations.” Nasa, the Gatekeeper of Space, denies those Space

craft to American citizens. Instead, it recycles overpriced

Apollo designs which are useless for CATS, proving that nasa

works for the military and the big aerospace contractors, not

for civilian pioneers. Buzz confirms another reason for nasa‘s too-expensive

hardware. “Stop the competition, use foreign landers and

boosters. Become partners with India and China,” the former

Lunar Module Pilot implores. Buzz is exasperated with nasa’s denial of common sense.

He half-jests when he says “If they don’t start making the

right things, I‘ll just have to move to a Pacific island and

watch.” Just then the hotel dishwasher came to the kitchen door

behind the speaker’s platform and took a picture of the lunar

astronaut’s back. Boy, he was actually that close to a man who

had walked on the moon. A moonwalker hero to whom nasa is not

allowed to listen. They are too politicized to do the right

thing for CATS. And the NSS just keeps on moaning. Save us a

place on the island, Buzz.

ALMeece

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