Miles has been very zealous in his interest in furthering Ariss activity and bruninga has had overwhelming influence with ariss. I view miles as the citizen and bruninga as the military.
Interesting. If I have had any influence it is only secondary. I am not a member of ARISS, I don't attend meetings, I am not involved. In fact, to ARISS I am also a loose cannon on deck, since I just got lucky and saw an opportunity to get something on SHuttle/ISS through pure luck and serendipidity.
Going back over the last 48 years, that is how most of our satellites have gotten to orbit. We certainly never paid our own way... I just got lucky about being in the right place at the right time and got 6 "amateur" payloads in space and mostly without having to consume any AMSAT or ARISS funds or resources (though PCSAT-2 was an operational nightmare for all of us).
Its clear to me who really has control over the space program.
I have to laugh at that! I am just an engineer, and to the faculty and infrastructure where I work, I'm just the lowly Lab Guy who fixes things... And there is NO support for Ham radio.... I dont even have control in my own lab. When I go on travel, I come back and they have rearranged my office, and thrown out half my ham stuff... (I am an admitted pack-rat)...
By the way, I figure those somalian pirates are just like us, bucanneers in search of the almighty buck.
Ah, I should tell you of my pay since I retired from the Navy and took this technician position as a contractor and watched my measly pay and 1 week annual leave go down 3 times each time they re-bid the contract and another wanna-be company under-bid my job, and then re-hired me... Unfortunately, they can tell I love this job and would almost work for free, so they take advantage of it.. But what a lucky place to be for ham...
Lets remember, its called the INTERNATIONAL space station. Many people have a say in what happens on it, not just us.
And because of the extrordinary process it takes to use the ISS for amateur radio or for getting any payload on board, I really do believe that we should be excited and proud of the ARISS success and just feel lucky to be on board.
On the otherhand, we should also be exploring the hundreds of coming CUBEsats coming to maturity. For peanuts compared to previous efforts, the CUBESAT program is an easy way to get to space. I atteneded the smallsat conference last week, and everyone is jumping on board! Even the huge aerospace companies are now seeing that this is a quick way to space for small payloads, and if you look at the size of an HT which is about all we need to make an AMSAT transponder, we can EASILY fly some AMSAT cubesats...
What I'd really like to see is what I tried to do with the MARScom and RAFT satellites... using 10 meters again for multi-user relay... 30 PSK31 users coming back down on an FM channel all talking at once...
Bob, WB4APR
Take care, pat
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