Jon Goff has an excellent roundup of the recent Space Frontier Society conference in Long Beach, for those of us not fortunate enough to have attended.

[Via Clark Lindsey]

Rand,

Thanks for the link!

No need to thank me--I always link to things I think worth reading. Is that a permanent page, or will it disappear when you're no longer associated with BYU? You might want to find a more permanent host for it.

Rand,

Yeah, it's temporary. I'm currently looking at
moving my web stuff to a new domain and a new
host. The incubator that MSS is part of also has
a fairly good hosting setup (IIRC, Rocketforge
just moved their stuff over there), I've just
been too busy since I got out here trying to get
my catalytic igniter prototype working. Good news
is that we may have hot flamey stuff tonight!

Anyhow, I'll make sure I let you and Clark know
where my new site is when I move it, so you can
update the link if you want.

~Jon

The report about Astrovision Australia's on geostationary observations is interesting. I've previously thought that the Weather Channel would be a great market for that sort of thing. Imagine being able to get high resolution telescopic views of weather hotspots, like hurricane eyes or tornadic supercells. If they got the frame rate high enough, they could show realtime video of cloud-to-cloud lightning, volcanic eruptions, or 9/11-like attacks.

Another recent conference report:
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/moon_mining_041110.html

People from Colorado School of Mines have been on these topics for many years, do they also attend SAS and SFC ?

Jonathon,

thanks for the writeup on the SFF conference, and the mention of our little Aussie venture in particular. I was going to take exception to your comment about me being a bit naive on my dismissal of the ELV business, and saying I have a semi-valid point on the long run business prospects in industry, but then I went back and looked at my presentation slides and realised that you were given the 30 second version of what is an hour-long presentation that I have presented at numerous conferences and for the government here and in the US. I'd be happy to share that with you, since it better explains the reasoning behind my high-level comments in Long Beach.

However, I do stand by my point - your comment about "because if nobody worked on space access, there wouldn't be a way for them to launch their satellites" is flawed, because there ARE launch vehicles out there for the satellites of today, so lack of future work on space vehicles doesn't necessarily translate into lack of space access for satellites like ours.

Regards,
Shubber

Jonathan,

sorry about mispelling your name - typing too fast!

Best,
Shubber