In attendance; Ray M., Brad J., Brian E., Debbie J., Dewey A., Farin W., Bob, James H., Jim W.

Dewey and Brian toured the meeting rooms and facilities for the conference and ascertained that the AV will be adequate for the needs of the speakers and will be serviced by CU's staff, although some of the rooms may need miking to cover the space without strain. Four of the the five buildings are clustered together and the remaining one is just down the block which will facilitate movement between the various tracks much better than past conferences. Assigned parking has yet to be worked out, but is in progress. Several hundred RSVPs have been received for the registration and we will need an as-yet-to-be-determined number of volunteers to man the tables, give directions, monitor the talks and transitions and general gofer work. We'll need large red dots symbolizing Mars distributed for directions and signage on campus and the brochures are being made and will need to be distributed around the Denver-Boulder area as well as Fort Collins and other Front Range locations.

We discussed how to start lining up volunteers for the conference itself to man the registration tables, information booth, audio-visual technicians and support (of which CU will provide mostly), room monitors, talk moderators, and go-fers to handle the various problems that inevitably crop up at an event of this size and complexity. We decided to send out an e-mail to the entire RMMS mail list of a few hundred as a start and will need a dedicated twenty or so people per day to handle the needs. Maggie will give us a list of specific tasks and assignments so that people can pick and choose their opportunities to participate which will be posted on the RMMS and Conference websites for sign-ups. The need for walkie-talkies or cell phones to coordinate inter-crew communications will also be addressed.

Dewey may be able to procure telescope privileges and even the planetarium as well and Farin will canvas the various astronomy-related and appropriate engineering and science student orgs and groups for possible volunteers. Some other space and planet exploration conferences for educators are going on at campus that same week so we may get some cross-fertilization going on. Further organizing operations will most likely be coordinated by e-mail and phone as we get closer to the conference and anxiety mounts. The new member James H., a student at CSU in Ft. Collins is very interested in starting a chapter up there and he and Jim W. will look into some of the organizing and logistical requirements for getting that started this fall semester. Brian E. was very helpful in later providing some advice and suggestions by e-mail in how to get started and Jim may possibly be able to serve as the staff advisor for James' creation of a student organization at CSU-- more to be revealed later.

The rest of the meeting was Brad's presentation of his rough draft for his upcoming conference talk, both as a shakedown voyage and to invite feedback and critiquing for the fine-tuning of his talk. The titled 'Settling Space: The Implications for Population Growth' had some rather surprising and unsettling conclusions and was quite well-reasoned and a very lively discussion ensued with Brad receiving much hopefully-useful and well-intentioned feedback. Rather than try to inadequately summarize his somewhat counter-intuitive results I would highly recommend attending his talk at the conference to get the full impact and import of what the implications actually are, it promises to be fascinating and possibly controversial.

The next meeting is on 7-18-05 at 7:00 P.M. in the usual place. The agenda includes more conference organizing and a talk to be given by Wayne White about space law developments. Be there or be earthbound!

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