The meeting was brought to order with a bang of the new traveling gavel by Chapter President Jim Burk, amid signs of approval (in the form of hoots, applause, and laughter) from the rest of the members. There were 13 members present, including the four Chapter officers and several special guests.
Dr. Robert Forward and Dr. Robert Hoyt from Tethers Unlimited gave an interesting talk on the use of rotating tethers and systems of tethers to send payloads to the moon and even mars. Dr. Forward says that a multiple tether system could deliver payloads to mars with 90-130 day transit times! Think about that, gentlemen. Most of us were accustomed to thinking about tethers as single elements and were delighted to learn of some rather innovative concepts. We extend our appreciation to both of these people for sharing their knowledge with us.
A tether paper will be presented at the August Mars Convention.
Marc Boucher, President of aTerra Technologies was down from Vancouver, B.C. and covered activities in the Canadian Chapters and also discussed some things he would like to do with the Marssociety web site. New Mars is growing.
The tentative date for their next meeting is April 10, 1999 and Pascal Lee will be the guest speaker.
Jim Burk reported on the executive meeting on web site organization two weeks ago and about his New site MarsNews.com Jim also reported on his RustyCon lecture and the need to have a couple of canned lectures for various opportunities. Jim's talk was videotaped and put on public access TV.
Dustin Green reported on student essay contest matters and pointed out that some students were interested in running their own contests, suggested we encourage this activity, and find some ways to cooperate with them. He also suggested we include some educational links on our web site and most members seemed to agree that this would be a good idea. Dustin is compiling a list of organizations that might be interested in a short lecture on the exploration of mars. Being a member of the ASME both he and most members feel that various engineering and professional organizations would be fertile ground for finding new members .
In a brainstorming session near the end of the meeting we decided that we need a checkout list of who has what stuff (books, slides, videos, etc.) belonging to the local chapter. We have started to acquire quite a few things and need some way to maintain some semblance of accounting for them.
In the relatively small club that we are at the present, most business is accomplished by informal conversations rather than by formal control by the chair, and there were usually two or three going on at any given time. Topics covered in this manner included manning tables at NorWesCon with the NSS, building models and display props, creating some canned lectures of various lengths to accommodate a variety of situations, book sales at RustyCon, , group rides to the Mars Society Convention in August at Boulder, Co., book keeping hassles and the shortage of funds in our cigar box, the shortage of funds for MARS on Devon Island, the need to recover all of our saleable books (get them back to David Stuart), the need to get moving on meeting our various congress critters, and that perpetual problem of finding a meeting place that is suitable for meetings, relatively convenient for most members, and is cheap (read free). Most now feel that the library with free meeting rooms is our best bet for now. Trouble is, the library doesn't serve up good coffee and brownies. I'm gonna miss this place.
One more thing. The tapes for the transcription project will be here "soon". It is my understanding that copies of the tapes are being made first.