Whos in ?

Hi Guyes ...this is Karanjeet Singh

One of your friends from SGC-05 Fukoka, Japan. I am from Toronto,Canada by currently at ISU-International Space university doing my masters. I applogise for being out of the loop all of last year, regarding the paper contest, but want to know whats next...in terms of organization and paper annoucements..and stuff..

Karanjeet

hey karanjeet
how are you

i heard a little about this paper
whats it about

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one kind word can warm 3 winter months
japanese proverb

Hi guys,

Ricardo here...

I'm looking forward to participating in this project. Can someone fill me in?
where do we stand so far?

cheers,
Ricardo

Ricardo-

Not much is happening, unfortunately. I sent Daniel (the group leader) an email this week, so hopefully we'll hear from him soon about where we should be heading with this and what needs to be solidified.

In the meantime, here are a few random thoughts I've been having:

Are we aiming to hold this contest before SGC 07 or just to make the necessary decisions about the conference during the Congress?

Who will be judging the competition? How many of us are actually experienced in propulsion issues (our current field of study/work), and how much help/experience are we going to need to pull in from outside sources?

Who will the competition be open to, as in, how technical do we want this to be? Submitting a paper for SGAC would definitely exclude it from submission to other venues, which could cut out the best contenders. I know I would love full funding to attend the SGC, but, professionally it would make more sense to publish any cutting-edge ideas in an aerospace/astronautical engineering journal. It is a shame we cannot include students younger than 18, because this would be a great opportunity for talented secondary school students to get involved....

Mad;

I was thinking about a similar timeline, but we really need to get moving on this if we're going to judge it in June. Can we discuss setting up deadlines for establishment of criteria, judging panel, announcement, and final paper due date?

As far as judging the competition goes, I think we should pull in at least one (if not a few) graduate students (at the least) and PhDs (preferable) to help out. Although my field is actually in nuclear space propulsion, I think we need some real experts to make this legitimate. This shouldn't be difficult to do, though.

As far as the SGAC submitting it to the IAC: the IAC paper submission has passed (it was March 11-12), so the papers could not be included in that conference. Also, papers already accepted for IAC 2007 could not be used for this contest as (I think, but correct me if I'm wrong) material to be presented must not have appeared in any other venues or be published prior to the conference.

I read here that SGC is only open to people who have turned 18 by the first day of the conference and are under 35. (This is probably for international travel concerns.) So we could definitely approach secondary students in their last year of school.

What do you think?

Why is not anybody responding to the new topic. please come to the topic called Action Stations!

Please tell us how you want to start. ---- I mean you yourself start talking on Nanotech.

cheers,

here's my very personal opinion on the subject.

I'd like to see young students, maybe people not (yet) related to space, using their imagination, Verne or Tchaikovsky style, years in the future, so ahead of us we won't even be able to cope with them.

Sure, i'm dreaming out loud, but innovation and new ideas often come from those out of the are of expertise.

We'd definetely be loosing more techncical, expert papers, but the young space generation has to meet its breakthroughs. And make a difference. I think.
On the other hand maybe it will be harder to get really good papers... but it's up to us to spread the word around...

Ciao,
Ricardo

Ricardo said :

using their imagination, Verne or Tchaikovsky style, years in the future, so ahead of us we won't even be able to cope with them.

If you people do not mind, I am a big supporter of the imagination ricardo is talking about, and I personally think (with my little knowledge) "Excitement is what drives us"

I don't think being at grass root makes anything wrong. Is it very bad to think of a type of "imagine and explore" approach?

That is, we as students, go on imagining something, and learn by the side as well about the reality, then we know what IS it, and what IS BETTER to be..... perhaps unfolding new horizon.... is that idea too cheesy?

I haven't introduced myself here.

I am Tiffany Frierson. I'm a physics major at the University of Memphis. I have been previously selected as a delegate to the symposium at Boston University by SGAC, so it doesn't matter if I get chosen as a delegate again. I'm just trying t contribute as much as I can.

I don't have much experience in propulsion but I'm working on that. Hopefully I can get onto the propulsion research team at my university by summer. In the meantime, I'm studying all aspect of space engineering on my own.

So. Yeah. :-)