Late last year Senator Obama released his plan on federally funding the Education Industry.  He will throw more money at the 50+ Billion dollar Education budget.. by taking money from the 16 Bilion dollar budget of the "Wasteful" NASA.  He would "postpone" the NASA Space projects "for five years". 

"Five years".  In other words, for a Four Year political office, he would kill it. 

"Education"  in other words Tools for the Education Industry.  At the expense of Inspiration that would actually make kids Want to learn anything.

When McCain got the nomination some Spaceniks cheered it as a way against Obama.  But when the emotion ended there was the fact that Senator McCain has been in office a long time and in that time there has been no clear and important movement towards Space from him either. 

Continuing day two of the convention, I chose the Political Outreach/Volunteerism sessions. 

I honestly figured that these would be the most important sessions of the whole weekend and that they would be considered mandatory for all members, if the real goal was to get The Case For Mars presented to power-masters and the steps begun. To my surprise, these sessions were held way up on the third floor in the smallest room of the center ... and there were seats to spare.

Day two of the convention is over and tonight I have a better feeling about this organization... not a great feeling but a better one.  The reason for the slight shift is likely due to getting actual questions answered. 

First off, in the morning I asked Patt Czarnik, the Society's Membership Director, what exactly the MS membership numbers were.  Knowing that the NSS is considered the big guy and also knowing that their American membership is only allegedly 12,000 gave me some concerns about the Mars Society. 

And the number is

 Day one of the 11th Annual Mars Society convention in Boulder is now over.

So... I came here to find out a couple of things but mostly I wanted to see if the Mars Society was a "for real" group with a plan or if instead the excellent Robert Zubrin book The Case For Mars had simply grown a fan club of anything-spacey folks.

If you're planning a trip to Seattle the Museum is great - for kids and adults - and, take my advice, make part of your day at least one of the short rides in the Old Tyme Aviation biplanes.

Why?  If you have flash installed, just look below.  Getting ready for the convention I noticed that I still had the videos on my cameras and because I couldn't sleep I fast-edited them down and made a quick Flash client for my Wowza back end; Nothin' fancy, in time I'll make the player prettier (maybe), but I hope you like the vid.

This is for my head, so don't read it, ok?

So I was just thinking, letting my mind wander on the costs of various technologies for getting payloads to space, and my mind drifted to Paul Allen and Elon Musk and I thought 'If I had a billion dollars would I really give some, most or all of it away for Space exploration?"  I thought of Paul Allen and a story I'd heard from someone who used to work for Vulcan.. he told me that once he had to fly out to one of Allen's yachts to do a hardware and software upgrade before the big guy flew in to throw a party. 

"One of Allen's yachts"  That was what triggered it...

couple interesting places showing where the space bucks go:

FedSpending.org set for NASA contract drilling.

Wikipedia space agencies and budgets

and... I meant Branson, not Branniff ;-)

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department."
- Werner Von Braun

Alright, I'm still not quite ready to just show this hand, because the answer to the question that keeps me up at night just seems too darned obvious to be possible.  But I have to dump this on you or I'll be pacing all night...

This afternoon I signed for the delivery of NASA report SP-509.  Interesting to find yet another page in Dr. Chris McKay's life .. but even more interesting that still with all of the documents and plans and learned elite meetings and conferences STILL the mention of the elephant in the room of Space industries *STILL* is never mentioned...