<div>Hi all,</div><div><br></div><div>Sorry for being slow to update. Need to organize my notes a bit and type it all out. Jerry has updated you on Day 1 so I'm just gonna wrap up some loose ends (and add some links for all to explore and chew on).</div>
<div><br></div><div><u>JSC tour</u></div><div>We arrived at Space Center Houston (the tour center for JSC) without incident only to discover that we didn't have an organizer accompany us so we had to call around before we were let in. Inside we were received by someone who came down from PR office who gave us a nice intro to the place and some tour recommendations. Once we found out that we're not going to have a guided tour we took matters into our own hands, someone in our party from JPL graciously volunteered to be a guide and we're off!</div>
<div><br></div><div>Trip itinerary basically went like:</div><div>1) A video showcasing NASA's achievement and future plans for the manned programs (quite dated IMO for our Youtube HD world).</div><div>2) Tram tour to JSC's Apollo Mission Control Center, Space Vehicle Mockup Facility & Rocket Park (there's an actual Saturn V restored rocket there!).</div>
<div>3) Lunch</div><div>4) Tour of Starship Gallery</div><div>Then most of us tour participants gathered somewhere quiet and just had a conversation about why we came to the Symposium and our expectations (quite a number of us were eager and willing to go hands on) before heading back to the hotel.</div>
<div><br></div><div>It's remarkable that so much was done using 1960s technologies (see <a href="http://www.thebernoullieffect.com/archives/images/JSC%20mission%20control700wide.jpg ">link</a> for image of the Mission Control), which was also echoed by a fellow participant (cinema seats today trumps the seats in the VIP gallery there). Another commented that visiting SpaceX first before JSC set the wrong expectations (I've seen some <a href="http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/05/the-rocket-factory-spacex-builds-them-from-top-to-bottom/?pid=2000&viewall=true">images</a> and I agree too). I think it's a terrible pity that this institution, of 'national pride' has so much of a museum feel everywhere (which made me understand better why Neil deGrasse Tyson's <a href="http://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc">lamented </a>that nobody dreams about the future anymore).</div>
<div><br></div><div><u>Papers</u></div><div>I can understand the gentleman from LLNL's sentiment because while there are good content and quality speakers (but not too many), there are very few projects that deal with actual implementation. The interesting projects I was fortunate to listen to were the ones on habitability around brown dwarfs, <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/servir/index.html">SERVIR</a>, <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/solarsail/solarsail_overview.html">Sunjammer</a>, <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/early_stage_innovation/niac/2012_phaseII_fellows_ritter.html">Optically Controlled and Corrected Active Meta-material Space Structures (OCCAMS)</a> and the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Open-Source-Starship-Alliance/215717941846697">Open Source Starship Alliance (OSSA)</a>. By the way I did not attend the presentation, but we were told by one of the Project Icarus guys that we should be interested in <a href="http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/projects/project-hyperion/">Project Hyperion</a> (maybe we can think of collaborating with them on mission planning).</div>
<div><br></div><div><u>Proposers Lunch</u></div><div>This was the one item on the agenda that I thought was well worth having us flying out all the way to Houston on our own dime (the rest was bonus). And instead of having a working lunch to discuss how we can all work together, we had a fancy lunch and each group was asked to take turns at the mic to share their project proposals in ~3 mins. We could have been asked to write a two paragraph summary, have everyone's summaries collated into a PDF to be mailed to all participants before Day 1 of Symposium. What a waste of our collective money and time.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Anyway, I did my best to pitch what we intend to do within the allocated 3 mins, that:</div><div><ul><li>we would like to start an international and inclusive organization called Space GAMBIT (for Global Alliance of Makers Building Interstellar Technologies), </li>
<li>organize interested Hackerspaces (and other maker communities) into working towards building a spacefaring civilization, </li><li>that we're aiming for 'sustainability living to enable a sustained effort' where Hackerspaces working towards a self sustainable community will be well positioned to contribute towards an international, long term space program,</li>
<li>our key focus areas are community, education and research</li><li>that we welcome partnerships with private & public sector,</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div><u>Day 3</u></div><div>There was another plenary session with Levar Burton, Workshop Wrap Up session and Track Wrap Up session to summarise the presentation tracks. Nothing much of significance, except that Space GAMBIT was mentioned a couple times in these sessions. Let's be grateful that others have taken notice and was nice enough to give us a shoutout! :)</div>
<div><br></div><div>That's about it from me!</div><div><br></div>Warmest regards,<br>Huei Ming<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 6:48 AM, Alex Cureton-Griffiths <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:alexcg@gmail.com" target="_blank">alexcg@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><br><div><div class="im"><div>On 15 Sep, 2012, at 9:33 PM, Jerry Isdale wrote:</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap:break-word">Huei Ming Tan and I are attending the 100Year StarShip Study Symposium in Houston Tx this weekend.<div>
Yesterday was the first full day ... Thursday there was a 'tour of Johnson Space Center' activity for early arrivals. Huei Ming was here and went on it. He can give a more full report, but as an indicator of conference preparation, the folks who went were surprised to learn when they got there that there was no arranged tour. Fortunately one of the attendees was from JPL and became an impromptu tour guide.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Appears to be about 250 registered attendees. Maybe 30 are teams that proposed for the DARPA RFP (like us). The conference printed agenda/materials is another indicator of the organization... It is very difficult to read and figure out. The font and spacing is very crammed, yet most of the page is blank space. There is little consistency in the timing layout. I dont think they have anyone with graphical design experience on board. Or at most a 1st year intern.</div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div></div>Wow, I would've expected a lot better. Go figure.</div><div><div class="im"><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div>The Opening Session was a couple Welcome speeches, including a video recorded welcome from Honorary Chair (former usa) President Bill Clinton. Mae Jemison, astronaut heading up 100YSS organization gave the long speech about the org. Lots of 'preaching to the choir' about how great this is and that they want to be inclusive, etc. Nothing of great news, IMHO.</div>
<div><br></div><div>THen started the 7 parallel tracks of papers and workshops .. 7!! really hard to choose, except that I was registered for a workshop (Research Priorities.. RP). Huei did a papers track. The workshop (13 people) chose to frame the discussion around the Socio-Political Environment aspects. We were asked to come up with various S/P hypothesis and then broke into small 3-4 person groups to discuss priorities as colored by one or another hypothesis. Some of the Hypothesis were: what if research is controlled by corporate interests? What if Anti-Science becomes dominant politically? What if there is a major world war? What if Social Cooperation proves impractical/impossible on world scale?</div>
<div><br></div><div>My group focused on the Corporate Dominance theme (odd for hacker like me, but groups were not self-selecting, rather by seats in room). First divided research into categories of Propulsion, Habitat, Social and Destination, and then talked about how Corporations might rank those in priorities. The personal views of participants showed here - One guy (corporate) said corporations would totally discount social priorities. I countered that might not be true as they have a strong interest in education to insure there are people to hire. Other social issues (like how do you keep a society together for duration of interstellar travel) were completely discounted in corporate priorities (i think they would be higher but ...) Propulsion was seen as highest priority. </div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div></div>I'd have thought they'd be higher as well - they're investing megabucks into getting a society out there then could end up pissing it away as it turns into Lord of the Flies. Mars One are hoping to do a reality TV show to finance first trip to Mars, by filming the actual crew. Perhaps falling apart would be good TV…</div>
<div><div class="im"><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><br></div><div>More details hopefully in the summaries to be given on Sunday. (and when I have time to write up notes)</div><div><br>
</div><div>Huei Ming and I then attended the Proposers Luncheon, which got us sit-down meals (vs box lunches for others) and a chance for people to talk quickly (3min) about their proposal. The moderator was not very good at pulling the microphone and first couple of people dragged on for 10min. One guy had a nuclear propulsion based system that he has been promoting since 1961 (tried for patents but denied, etc) and ran on and on about it for a while. They nearly cut off the last 3 groups - including us. Huei did talk and turns out there are a couple other very interesting related groups here with whom we have connected (more later).</div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div></div>At last, some good news out of this conference :)</div><div><div class="im"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><br></div><div>I went to a papers session in later afternoon, and Joe Ritter of the Open Source Space Alliance (and one of the track chair's) gave me 10min of his presentation (last of day) to talk about SpaceGAMBIT. Lot of people were excited by it and one former LLNL scientist came up afterwards to say he was about to give up on conference until he heard last couple of talks including ours. Now he has some hope for effort.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Overall there has been little about the 100YSS organization itself here. What is there corporate org, plans, research done, etc. It seems that they are using the seed $$ to set up a group that will then do fundraising and after that maybe do some research support.</div>
</div></blockquote></div>Be interested to see how well that works. I'd like to the see the ROI on their fundraising at some point<br><blockquote type="cite"><div class="im"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><br>
</div>
<div>(I skipped out on the extra cost dinner/reception last night and went to a blues club with a friend who lives here in Houston. ... wound up talking till 2am)</div><div><br></div><div>Lots of interesting people, from hard science, social angles, and some lunatic fringe too... I'm probably in the latter group - Hackerspaces in Space? Are you Crazy? .... yes.<br>
</div><div><font color="#333333" face="'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:13px;line-height:18px"><br></span></font></div><div>Jerry Isdale</div><div><div><div><div style="word-wrap:break-word">
<span style="text-align:-webkit-auto;text-indent:0px"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><span style="text-align:-webkit-auto;text-indent:0px"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div style="line-height:normal;border-collapse:separate;letter-spacing:normal;font-variant:normal;text-transform:none;font-size:medium;font-style:normal;white-space:normal;font-family:Helvetica;font-weight:normal;word-spacing:0px">
<a href="mailto:isdale@spacegambit.org" target="_blank">isdale@spacegambit.org</a></div><div style="line-height:normal;border-collapse:separate;letter-spacing:normal;font-variant:normal;text-transform:none;font-size:medium;font-style:normal;white-space:normal;font-family:Helvetica;font-weight:normal;word-spacing:0px">
USA Program Lead, SpaceGAMBIT</div><div style="line-height:normal;border-collapse:separate;letter-spacing:normal;font-variant:normal;text-transform:none;font-size:medium;font-style:normal;white-space:normal;font-family:Helvetica;font-weight:normal;word-spacing:0px">
Global Alliance of Makers Building Interstellar Technology</div><div style="line-height:normal;border-collapse:separate;letter-spacing:normal;font-variant:normal;text-transform:none;font-size:medium;font-style:normal;white-space:normal;font-family:Helvetica;font-weight:normal;word-spacing:0px">
<a href="http://SpaceGAMBIT.org/" target="_blank">http://SpaceGAMBIT.org</a></div><div style="line-height:normal;border-collapse:separate;letter-spacing:normal;font-variant:normal;text-transform:none;font-size:medium;font-style:normal;white-space:normal;font-family:Helvetica;font-weight:normal;word-spacing:0px">
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