Tuesday Apr 10, 2007

A local focus

This installment of the SEDS USA blog will focus on the happenings of my own local chapter while the next few will be on other local chapters.


The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a SEDS chapter that boasts about 50 members and active technical, social, and educational outreach programs. Our technical project is a super sonic rocket that is to carry a 45 kg payload up to about 6000 meters. Once built and tested, it is to be launched and its position tracked used an array of audio sensors. These data will then be compared with GPS recordings. On the educational side we are preparing for Illinois Space Day, which is to be held on the 14th of April and is to be oriented toward younger students. It will include a video conference with astronaut Scott Altman. Also we are working on sending presentations to local schools in an effort to increase space enthusiasm. Our social plans include Yuri's Night on April 12th as well as participating in the Relay for Life against cancer. And that's it.




Sunday Feb 11, 2007

SEDS_USA_UPDATE_2

Hello. We in SEDS USA are pleased to say that five people have contacted us about started local SEDS chapters, including one person in Afghanistan. About our projects, both the SEDS Art Project and the Zero G project have ground to a halt due to a lack of funding, at least for the time being. The standard lines of communications are not being all that useful, so our Projects Director is contacting out new Board of Advisors. Also there is a rocket project in the works. It will probably take the form of a competition of some sort between SEDS USA chapters and will be held at the X-Prize Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We will not know exactly what the competition will be until it is clear what we can actually do at the X-Prize Cup. And last but not least Emily Hardegree (hardegee@email.arizona.edu) has requested that the other national SEDS boards create a page on their history: stuff like when your national organization first formed, who were the founders,
major events in their history, what they are working on now, who is currently
on their exec board, etc.

Daniel Anderson