President's Message

Greetings and welcome to 2002.

Quite a few space activities are planned for this year: a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission in February, a number of construction and outfitting flights to the International Space Station, collection of mineralogical data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, the possible flight of the second space tourist, a number of missile defense tests over the Pacific, and a considerable amount of data gathering from operating spacecraft.

Closer to home, NASA has a new administrator with a mandate to put some fiscal restraint on the agency budget in general and the International Space Station in particular. There has already been a hue and cry from the space science community about possible cutbacks to the outer solar system exploration budget. In the manned space arena, several groups have protested plans to eliminate the Habitation module and additional crew rescue capability from the Space Station, thereby limiting the facility to three residents indefinitely. Complicating the budget issue is the recession and the need to pay for ongoing anti-terrorist activities both at home and abroad.

Our task in the space community is to ensure that the Administration emphasizes work which a) increases the number of people in space and enables more to go up later, b) gathers the data needed for human exploration and settlements, and c) allows the smoothest transition to private enterprise operations in orbit.

Last year saw the end of a number of government-sponsored reusable launch vehicle efforts. NASA has shifted focus away from flying test beds like the X-33 and X-34 and more towards ground-based technology demonstrators as part of the Space Launch Initiative. From a space activist standpoint, we will probably be urging the government to develop technologies which can be used most effectively by commercial launch concerns. This means we'd like the systems to be inexpensive to procure and operate, robust, and reproducible. We don't want the Space Launch Initiative to become purely a technology development effort or a form of aerospace welfare.

OASIS enters the year with approximately one hundred members and a good financial balance sheet. We'll be working to increase our membership and provide our existing members incentives to continue with us. We'll do this by making 2002 as interesting and involving as possible. We have a number of activities planned for this year, starting with a Star Party on January 26th†, at least one trip to an amateur rocket launch in the Mojave desert, a number of public events, speakers at our meetings, and at least one space movie screening. We'll be providing you with details as they become available.

The Board would like to thank Terry Hancock for doing an excellent job as the Odyssey editor. He has performed his editorial duties in an admirable fashion while balancing a busy home and work life. Terry has decided to move on to other endeavors and we wish him the best of luck.

With Terry's departure, we're welcoming a new Odyssey editor, Kris Cerone. I urge the Odyssey readership to help Kris by letting her know the types of articles you'd like to see, sending her a steady supply of good articles and photos, and recommending good guest writers to contribute to the publication.

I've been the chapter's vice-president and events coordinator for the past few years but never sat in the big chair. Now that I've been elected President, I hope to do well by you.

Steve Bartlett

†The Star Party was cancelled due to weather. Another will be scheduled for a later date.