Hams are not poor, many of us are willing to spend thousands on the latest

radio gear, and DX-peditions have raised substantial amounts of money to

finance trips to remote islands so that contributors can get a rare QSL card.

We have the financial means but are lacking the organization. We have to

convince members that if they can spend $2000 on a new radio then they can

also send a $2000 check to AMSAT if they want new satellites in orbit.

 

Some of our members are quite satisfied with low orbit FM satellites and think

that keeping these in space is the top priority. Many others still remember

the days of AO-10, AO-13 and AO-40 (when it was working). Many of those

members became discouraged and left AMSAT when we failed to replace those

satellites with new ones. We can keep the LEO sats in orbit for those who want

them by offering our radio boards to universities and other groups who want to

build CubeSats but don't know a lot about radio. To serve the long term

interests of the amateur radio community we must set our sights on larger,

more powerful and higher satellites, and we will probably have to pay for

those launches because the era of free launches for satellites larger than a

Cubesat is gone and not coming back. Fortunately the newly emerging private

space industry offers launch options for much less money than the days when we

got "free" launches from the government.

 

The short lifetime of Phase 3D is a valid point, it was intended to last much

longer except for a simple and avoidable mistake. The trouble is that P3D was

a one of a kind mission with no possibility of a follow up mission. Future

AMSAT HEO programs must be ongoing programs in which the lessons learned from

earlier satellites can feed into subsequent missions. AMSAT must also prove

that we are capable of learning lessons from ours and other's failures and

applying them to new satellites. AMSAT has to prove that it is capable and

worthy of such support, because we are only as good as our last failure. The

petty bickering that has occurred recently has to end so that we can present a

professional appearance to outsiders.

 

I was working in the Hubble control center when the flawed mirror was

discovered. Much has been written about why the conflicting optical tests were

not followed up, but the project WAS behind schedule and over budget and

Congress was looking at cancellation if it fell any further behind. Schedule

and budget pressure are very real worries for NASA missions. I will simply

point out that NASA repaired the flawed telescope within three years at

minimal cost and the telescope has worked flawlessly for over 30 years now and

is still going strong. That is a pretty successful failure. And NASA runs the

CubeSat Launch Initiative and deploys many of them from the ISS, so it

obviously does support CubeSats.

 

Dan Schultz N8FGV