Posted on 08/15/2005 7:18:21 PM PDT by KevinDavis
At the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in May in Washington DC, Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of The Mars Society, gave a well-received speech about his favorite topic and invited all attendees to that group’s eighth conference in Boulder Colorado. He promised that it would be “The Woodstock of Mars.”
Woodstock carries powerful imagery to most who hear the word. To some, it was the pinnacle of the free-thinking ’60s: communal living in a farmer’s field with days of music and other forms of entertainment. To others, Woodstock was a mess, filled with counterculture people and ideas reveling in their own concept of what the world could be. Given some of the images that came from the concert, it was not the kind of world that many people outside the experience wanted to live in. Both visions can be used to describe space conferences.
So approximately 325 people (estimates varied from 250 to 400) descended on Boulder, Colorado last week for this year’s Mars Society Conference. As those who’ve visited Boulder can attest, it is a strangely poetic place to hold a Mars Woodstock. This convention comes after a year that’s seen private spaceflight, a change in NASA administrators coupled with a shift in timelines of the Vision for Space Exploration, a bumpy return to flight of the space shuttle, and continuing finds from a flotilla of spacecraft exploring the Red Planet. The stage was set for something big.
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereview.com ...
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