In attendance: Brian E., Brad J., Dewey A., Ray Mc C., Lowell, Ben Jim W.

Some discussion about the Chinese briefly having more taikonauts in space than astronauts or cosmonauts for the first time ever and implications for the US's competitiveness in human space exploration. This led to the Space Exploration Alliance's recent splitting with the Space Frontier Foundation over disagreement about VSE and the built-in waste and lack of private enterprise involvement.

Dewey did a slide show of his comparative planetary geology class and the other-planet field trip that they took to Earth-analogues around the southwest including various lava fields and flows, volcanoes, calderas, dunes, the KT boundary layer, mineral deposition, erosion patterns, rock glaciers, impact craters and canyons. Altogether a very nice showing of these features and their underlying geologies and formation processes and how they are similar and different compared to other planets of interest in the Solar system. Recommended websites included Google earth and Google moon for more exploration and information.

Brian E. showed a PowerPoint presentation of his 10-4 thru 10-09-05 trip to the Las Cruces spaceport, the site of The X Cup where he had a Mars Society booth set up. Various speakers included Eric Lindbergh, Rick Searfoss, Peter Diamandis, Steve Bennett, David Gump and others. Oct 9th, the flight of Xcor's EZ Rocket had an attendance of twenty to thirty thousand people, Star Chaser Industries test-fired their Churchill rockets (the second one of which blew up impressively), and various other X Prize competitors had their ships or scaled mock-ups on display, including Rutan's Space ship 1. Brian said the Mars Society booth was busy consistently throughout and a good time was had by all.

We ended up by talking about launch and development (range fees, insurance etc.) costs of the EELV vs. the HLV as well as the current reconfiguration of the CEV which is basically an Apollo-type capsule with forty year newer technology.

The next meeting is for 11-21-05 on CU at the usual place and 7 P.M. time. On to Mars.

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