Ray,
We agree. Our partnerships with universities and other organizations over the past several years have opened up that door to us. With the work pioneered by Tony Monteiro and continued by Jerry Buxton, we obtained fully-funded launches for three of the Fox-1 satellites through NASA's CubeSat Launch Inititative. Additionally, the first two GOLF satellites have also been selected to participate in that program. Securing seven fully-funded launches for our satellites is no small feat. Jerry's hard work on these CubeSat Launch Initiative proposals and his commitment to maintaining excellent relationships with NASA and our university partners has placed us in an excellent position.
Led by Jerry, along with Drew Glasbrenner, we are also partnering with several universities to place amateur radio transponders on CubeSats that are under development.The first of these satellites carrying an AMSAT developed and built transponder resulting from these partnerships, HuskySat-1, built at the University of Washington, will launch this fall. Work is well underway with several other entities to place at least a dozen more of these systems on university-built CubeSats over the next several years.
In late June, the Board elected Frank Karnauskas, N1UW, as the Vice President - Development charged with seeking out further grants and partnerships. He brings a lot of knowledge and energy to this position and already has a team of two individuals to help him with the grant-writing process. The incumbent directors are well aware that we need to find partnerships and funding from outside the world of amateur radio and we have been working to improve in these areas by finding individuals with the right sklll sets to address them. I note, for the record, that AMSAT is running a modest surplus through the first six months of the year despite large expenditures for GOLF and ARISS hardware development.
In addition to finding additional sources of revenue, we also need to modernize some of our office and membership processes. We are currently working with an IT contractor to modernize our decades-old membership database and enable us to provide modern, digital services to our membership, such as digital distribution of The AMSAT Journal.
Addressing deficiencies that date back 20+ years takes time, but I believe we are on a path that will enable us to Keep Amateur Radio in Space for another 50 years and beyond.
As you are also aware, beyond the issue of partnerships and revenue, we also need to continue our work on regulatory matters. The issue of ITAR and EAR is, of course, a big one. Last fall, the Board authorized the retention of a law firm to advise us on these matters and we are nearing completion of a policy to address ITAR and EAR matters that will open the door to again work with other AMSAT organizations and entities abroad. We are also concerned about orbital debris mitigation and amateur satellite licensing issues with the FCC. I authored AMSAT's comments and reply comments to the FCC on both small satellite licensing and orbital debris mitigation rulemaking proposals and have also been working with the ARRL's Washington counsel (an AMSAT life member) on these issues.
73,
Paul Stoetzer, N8HM Executive Vice President Member of the Board of Directors AMSAT
On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 11:31 AM Ray Soifer via AMSAT-BB [email protected] wrote:
I am not a candidate for the AMSAT BoD (been there, done that) nor am I endorsing or opposing anyone. Most of you know me; if not, please see my QRZ.com page. As the the then EVP, it was my fate to be Acting President during the failure and partial recovery of AO-40. AMSAT's basic problem is financial. Universities and even high schools get NASA up.money to build and launch Cubesats, while AMSAT's limited resources are slowly drying up.
I don't have a solution, but I am not running for the BoD. I urge those who are to put their solutions forward, not just their gripes. 73 Ray W2RS _______________________________________________ Sent via [email protected]. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official views of AMSAT-NA. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb