How the Affiliate Agreements get the snowball rolling

Open Letter

To: All space advocacy organizations of all types, flavors and philosophies:

The proposal: Gather all the existing space societies under one "tent", literally on the same page; maximize collaboration by first getting them to 'agree to disagree' when required, and simply get them to accept the money ACCESS wants to give them.

Here's the catch: what ACCESS wants in return for the money. You agree to support us, what is it we want?

What we want is your space advocacy in an organized program, the key to this entire plan.

First and foremost, your support is simply the resolution itself, so we can all wave a single piece of paper in front of our government which incorporates the names of everybody who is anybody in space visionary circles and say "Hey, we're not fighting anymore. We want it all and we want it soon and we have gathered together people and money and we're going to make it happen. Let's work together with private industry and get this space-faring civilization formed already!"

Your efforts: We want to energize the space advocate community with money from the general public and exploit the space advocate's extensive knowledge, enthusiasm and vision in classrooms everywhere in America.

If you belong to a space society, we want to put YOU in front of a group of kids. We want you to develop lesson plans and other instructional material. We want you to put together weekly meetings with the local "space club" - ACCESS chapters or chapters of your own fine space society. Sit down with kids, parents, space professionals, local professionals and Joe Public, help ACCESS figure out how to build all the Hardware we're going to need to do all the things we need to do.

For example, seventh graders can mock up certain pieces of equipment, the Juniors and Seniors can start with that and mock up something better, college kids can do advanced mockups ready for final evaluation leading to prototyping. Every grade level will contribute.

There is plenty to do, there are a heck of a lot of things to figure out if we're going to become a space-faring society soon enough for some of us to take advantage of it. Kids can't do it all, we'll need to bring the pros in to build reliable stuff, but what we can do is greatly reduce the cost of developing our hardware. The user-friendliness and robustness we need in our Hardware will be well thought out before final design starts. The professionals at the meetings will steer things in the right direction well enough for this hardware development approach to work.

We can get a huge cross section of the community involved and that will get us the market penetration we need to get the cash we need to make this all happen. There are space advocates - current and future - in every profession and trade and we will need the knowledge of those professions and trades as we move into space on a regular basis. Maybe not quite the Butcher, Baker and Candlestick Maker, but you'll get the idea as we go along. :-)

So that's the plan: get the space geeks together, energize the kids, work with everyone there is to work with, shift the public awareness of space development into high gear, collaborate to figure out just what exactly it is we want, talk enough fellow citizens into contributing, build hardware, fly hardware, execute the plan, hey presto we're space-faring.

That's what we all want, right?

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(This page created July 9 2005)
(This page last edited November 12 2005 [added link])
(This page last edited July 21 2005)