Bill
Apology accepted.
thanks...sorry still sorting the email out after coming home...
but I would submit
that until you walk in the shoes of the ARRISat team members who are busting their pick to try and do the right thing for the members, maybe, just maybe, you should temper your judgment about their abilities and short comings given that without their very best intentioned efforts you'd have nothing to complain about and Amateurs wouldn't have a new satellite to look forward to.
OH I am cheering for you I just dont think that the group has much chance of success and that if it comes it will be more the product of "random chance" then good project management.
Which I dont think AMSAT has much of.
There are no "shoes" to walk in. Really there are not. Volunteering is the same if you are the kid who mows the church yard to the doctor who volunteers at a clinic for folks without health insurance. The act is a individual one that is made after considering all the mandatory obligations that one has...and once you do that then until one terminates the voluntary work (again because in part the mandatory obligation might get to much) then the job is no different then what one is getting "wages" for....one either does it or one doesnt one manages it correctly or one doesnt...
and past that everything else is as the good Baron use to say "twaddle".
The facts are that coming off a failure of a relatively simple project the group chose a much more complicated path and was unable to complete it in the time allotted.
Now the group is stuck with a much more difficult task...
Everything after that is just excuses (space is hard, no one is doing this but us, one cannot understand this or that until they do it....etc)
A much more prudent approach, one with more success built in would have been to analyze the failure, figure out the weak points, correct those and then try flying "that" or something slightly more complicated.
at least that is how it is done in test flying...
But here on the board I am told that space is so much harder...dont worry that word comes down a lot in Southern Houston.
good luck you folks will need it
Robert WB5MZO
_________________________________________________________________ Ready for Fall shows? Use Bing to find helpful ratings and reviews on digital tv's. http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=digital+tv%27s&form=MSHNCB&pub...