Science and Business in Space - A BusinessACT seminar (Canberra Au

bit of a long shot, but did anyone else on this list go to this ?

http://www.business.gateway.act.gov.au/documents/dir63/doc507963.html

If you are in Australia, it will be broadcast on Radio National as part
of the Buzz program in a week or two.

Was an interesting night.

The speakers were :
Dr Franklin Chang-Diaz (NASA Astronaut and Plasma Physicist) and
Dr Ben Greene (CEO of Electro Optic Systems -
http://www.eos-aus.com/default.htm )

some of the topics touched on were:

Plasma engines for Space Propulsion
The use of ISS for testing of said engines
The use of ISS for an Alpha Mass Spectrometer ? ( I think I have that
right - will look it up later to check )
in response to a question about ISS being a white elephant - we are just
begining to see/realise what we can use ISS for.

How close we came to having so much Space Debris to make getting into
space practically impossible.
The use of Plasma propelled craft to service satellites.
The use of Plasma Ablation propulsion to deorbit Space Junk, and to
change the orbits of Satellites (hey want a higher orbit, sure we can do
that from here, it will just burn off the outer layer or two of atoms
from the satellite.)
The use of SSPS type system, to power the lasers that perform the Plasma
Ablation orbit changes
How NASA is/should be leaving LEO to the entrepeneurs and concentrating
further out.
The B612 Foundation ( http://www.b612foundation.org/ )
JIMO
Travel to Mars
Iridium being a few years too early
The effect of minaturisation on satellites
how in the 90's Satellites being launched had been in development for at
least 10 years, where as now is more likely 4 or 5 years.
The use of Lasers in communications.
The ability to get Fibre optic type bandwidth from use of said lasers.
The coming change from Radio freqs. to Laser ( the comment was made of a
person walking through a laser soup. each person having their own
dedicated laser line with fibre optic type bandwidth wherever they are)
The cost reduction of Satellites in LEO compared to 20 years ago.
The lower power consumption of todays satellites.
How the lifetime of a sat. is limited by its Station keeping fuel supply.
Space mining
"Following the water"
The use of Zero - g manufacturing.
The possible replacement of the Shuttle, with two different systems, one
for payload one for human.
niche markets for space.
The amount of Space Junk,(200,000 to 250,000 pieces) and the length of
time until we can start doing a decent clean up of it ( 10 years )

It only went for an hour and a half, so it was all very brief but did
get the brain ticking over.