This is our 32nd issue. Frontlines is a formatted monthly Moon Society news report that comes out each month just after the first (of two) Management Council meetings each month, and/or after the publication of the month's issue of Moon Miners Manifesto. These reports are being archived, so members and visitors can check past reports.

Frontlines reports on Society activities, efforts, and projects. You pay your dues, and have a right to know what we are doing to make your membership worthwhile, and to address your interests in a place for humans on the Moon.

We have been making steady progress on a wide variety of fronts. We want you to hold us accountable for continuing to do so!

November 3rd Meeting

At this meeting, we introduced our first engineering concept competitions aimed at student groups, and decided to match a Lunar Reclamation Society Prize of $500, as well as lobby the National Space Society to do likewise, in all instances, drawing upon the recently received bequest funds. There was overall enthusiasm about this initiative, which we were taking to the SEDS SpaceVision conference the following weekend. More below. For details, see SEDS below.

The next Management Committee Meeting will be on Wednesday, November 17th

If you would like the Management Committee to consider a new initiative or idea, contact president@moonsociety.org

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Town Meeting Discussions  and our Annual Membership Meeting


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Ongoing collaborations with other organizations:

 
SEDS - Students for the Exploration and Development of Space

Moon Society Director of Project Management and I attended SEDS SpaceVsion 2010, their annual conference at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana (UICU) 140 miles south of Chicago, the weekend of November 5-7th.
We presented a pair of engineering design competitions, open to SEDS chapters and to other student groups.$1,500 in Prize money for each competition would be donated by the Moon Society, the Lunar Reclamation Society, and the National Space Society ($500 from each for each) from recently received bequest funds. We will be seeking cosponsorship from other groups as well.

One engineering design competition, The Lavatube Skylight Explorer,  will focus on the challenge of exploring lava tube skylights that have recently been discovered on both Moon (in the maria lava seas) and on Mars (on the slopes of  its great shield volcanoes.) Download the latest version of our Powerpoint Presentation.

The other is a CubeSat-based Solar Sail Comsat to be designed in a competition by student teams. The probe would use its solar sails to visit the L4 and L5 Earth-Moon Lagrange points, characterize their expected dust bowls (Sargasso See-like concentrations of space "flotsam") and then go into low lunar orbit, using their solar sails to prevent orbital decay, and thus pioneer the way for constellations of lunar communications and GPS satellites, needed for the opening of the lunar frontier. Currently, when their thruster fuel supplies are exhausted, the orbits of lunar probes decay from Mascon interference and crash into the lunar surface. Solar Sails would provide an ingenious escape from that fate.  We have not yet put together a Powerpoint Presentation on this competition.

We are delighted to have the support of the National Space Society and SEDS on both competitions, and there was a high level of interest on both competitions at UIUC.

The time line will be set by academic needs. So we will try to perfect the design and competition constraints and rules so that Students can engage in one or both in the 2011-2012 school year. Unfortunately, we did not have all this ready months ago, but then, months ago, we did not know that we would be getting a bequest.

Affiliation with SEDS. NSS Sand SEDS are already affiliated. It is time we enter the fray. Our society, like all others, is graying. What better way to attract students and young people in general than by partnering an organization whose members have self-selected themselves for interest in space.

We will be putting to the Moon Society Board a proposal to amend the bylaws to create a new class of membership: student chapters, in which the student chapters, not its members, become members of the Moon Society. But SEDS students would have access to the electronic version of MMM for the duration of their membership in the SEDS chapter. After they graduate or move on, we would have an attractive "first year" membership registration offer for them. The details of this proposal are yet to be worked out, to minimize pitfalls of abuse and other problems.

Next year's SEDS SpaceVision Conference will be held in November, 2011 at the University of Colorado Boulder campus. The Moon Society plans to stay involved.

As part of ramping up these two competitions, we are already talking to OpenLuna.org, Space Frontier Foundation, and other groups such as American Lunar Society, AIAA, ExploreMars.org, MarsDrive, The Mars Foundation, and NASA-Glenn in Cleveland where there is an underutilized 510 ft drop tower that would be ideal for demonstrating student Lavatube Skylight Explorer equipment. We welcome donations to the cash prizes, as well as of donations of software, equipment, or other things desirable to student groups. We welcome those who can only help with publicity as well.

Another idea we proposed is to encourage the formation of an at large NSS chapter of alumni of the International Space University, to act in advisory role to both NSS and the Moon Society in designing student contests and competitions.

The National Space Society:

In addition to our collaboration on these two engineering concept competitions, we will be announcing shortly our collaboration with NSS on the Kalam-NSS Energy Initiative that has been very much in the news of late. This is a proposal to accelerate demonstrations of space-based solar power, and to address the technological challenges involved. In the background would be a new collaboration between the United States and India on this effort. Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is the former president of India. Previously he had been a major rocket scientist at ISRO, India's Space Research Organization. Kalam sees the benefit not only as limitless clean power, but also as a way to provide clean drinking water to the billions of people living in areas where there is simply not enough water, let alone clean water.

Kalam had been invited to speak at ISDC 2010 in Chicago, and though he could not attend in person, did so by television, and took advantage of this opportunity to challenge the National Space Society to be his partner in selling this proposal to the G20 - the group of 20 nations that together produce 80% of the world's economic wealth.  But in the aftermath of ISDC, there was little or no response from NSS, at least not publicized.

We then took advantage of a unique opportunity to present Dr. Kalam with our University of Luna Award while he was visiting Toronto. Within a week of this, Kalam and NSS announced that the challenge would be accepted. The Moon Society may only have played a footnote role, but sometimes that's what it takes to get things going. Dr. Kalam is now aware of our Moon Miners' Manifesto India Quarterly, and of the Moon Society, and Moon Society India. We, not NSS, produced the working solar power beaming tabletop demonstration unit which made its debut at ISDC 2008. And we helped encourage ISDC to invite Kalam to speak.

Our future role in this will be to call attention to the economic advantages of using lunar resources instead of terrestrial ones, for construction of the great bulk of components for solar power satellites and for Geosynchronous platforms that could host hundreds of individual communications and other satellites, thus decongesting GEO and ensuring continued economic growth of Earth's Econosphere. We will also contribute by calling for development of clean launchers to launch SPS systems coming from Earth. Not to do so defeats the environmental benefits of SPS systems.

Moon Miners Manifesto & Other Moon Society Publications

A new issue of Selenology has been published.

The Summer 2010 issue of this newsletter from our affiliate The American Lunar Society can be downloaded from this directory, using your Moon Society member username and password - http://moonsociety.org/members/selenology/

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Chapters & Outposts Report - see the updated map of Moon Society Chapters and Outposts
Also check our regularly updated Chapter Events page

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NEXT: November 17th, December 1st and 15th