Next Meeting, Saturday, August 3rd, 2019 – 3PM – Barbara Bush Library – Featured Speaker: Anima Sabale

Join us on Saturday, August 3, 2019 at 3PM at the Barbara Bush Library for our next NSS North Houston Space Society meeting. Our featured speaker will be Anima Sabale.

Anima Patil-Sabale is based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center where she manages the Orion Spacecraft Simulations Lab. She has worked on NASA’s Kepler Mission and in NASA’s Intelligent Systems Division prior to this and has 14 years of experience in the software industry prior. Anima has been a Commander for the HERA VII mission, a 14 day Human Exploration and Research Analog at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in 2015. She has also been a Commander for a Mars Analog Mission at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah in 2018, leading a crew of 5 in a study on how astronauts will live, work and survive on Mars. She has been a First Tier Support Engineer for Hi-SEAS for about 4 years. She is a Scientist-Astronaut candidate for Project PoSSUM (Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere) and Project PHEnOM, both commercial suborbital spaceflight research programs. She has been contributing as a research subject to important astronautics research studies flying parabolas to test the performance of a commercial spacesuit in microgravity, laying in a head-down tilt position for NASA’s Simulated Microgravity Fluid Loading study, spinning in a centrifuge and pulling upto 6G’s to contribute to an important FAA commercial spaceflight study, providing inputs to NASA’s astronaut food study et. al.

Summary of July 6, 2019 NSS North Houston Space Society Monthly Meeting

First off, I want to thank Greg Stanley and Dough Hall for putting together such a good June meeting.

Their presentations and more information about the meeting are available on our website: SpaceX StarLink, Skylon/SABRE, and more at the June 1, 2019 – NSS North Houston Space Society Meeting

We covered some recent space events:

SpaceX was successfully able to capture one of the payload fairings. The video from the onboard camera is stunning:

Watch the replay of the entire launch.

Partially reusable rockets are here, and they are changing the economics of getting payloads and people into space. 100% reusable rockets are right around the corner and they will change EVERYTHING!

Elon tweeted July 7” Exciting progress in Boca! Hopper almost ready to hover. Based on tonight’s test, looks like 600 Hz Raptor vibration problem is fixed.”
SpaceX targets 2021 commercial Starship launch
And don’t forget about DearMoon, the plans to use Starship to send people around the moon in 2023.

Then Nathan gave an overview of his experiences at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC).

The main focus of the presentation was about our efforts to return to the moon as part of the Artemis program.

And we have not been back since Apollo 17 lifted off from the moon on December 14, 1972.

At ISDC 2019 the NSS North Houston Space Society chapter received a “Special Merit” award for our efforts to fund and select a ZERO-G experience for a Houston area high school student.

(see Summary of February 2019 NSS North Houston Space Society Meeting – Space Infrastructure & High School Astronaut Contest for more details)

ISDC 2019 was an amazing event. And I recommend everyone plan on attending next year when ISDC is in Dallas. May 28-31, 2020
https://isdc2020.nss.org/

We also had a drawing for a Lego Lunar Module. Banu’s son won the drawing. Congratulations!

We had a great group for this meeting:

Be sure and come to our August 3, 2019 meeting. It will be at Barbara Bush Library at 3PM. Anima Sabale will be the guest speaker.