Thursday, July 12, 2007

Heinlein Centennial - National Space Society

George Whitesides from the National Space Society and George Howard from the Heartland of America Chapter of the NSS had a space advocacy presentation at the Heinlein Centennial. I can't report on this talk too much, because I missed a great deal of it because of some confusion on my part with session titles and schedule changes. They discussed a number of space-related activities that the NSS has that everyone, even those without Aerospace Engineering graduate degrees, can get involved with. As I tend to do (because of this blog, not because they're more important than the others) I tended to take notes on the ones involving prizes or awards:

Space Settlement Art Contest - which they discussed as a possible annual competition. They showed how the winning art looks in the calendar, too.

Space Settlement Student Design Contest

The Moon-Mars Blitz, advocating the NSS's space priorities to Congress, including Centennial Challenges - They would like to do this again in the Fall.

They gave a lot more information on the NSS and the local chapter, and had a discussion with audience members (and it seemed from their comments like some were NSS members, but others were more involved with SF and were interested in learning about space advocacy) about their ideas on what NSS should be concentrating on.

Peter Hodges has a post from the point of view of Generation X on this NSS seminar.