ssto senatorial aide breifing recollections the following are my thoughts on a meeting that i hugh kelso and bob lilly had with an aide of sen patty murrays we were there to discuss ssto and commercial space this is how it went after receiving a packet containing a presentation on the benifits of ssto i called and tried to schedule a meeting with our local senator d patty murray washington state i started asking for an hour and when i heard the gasp on the end of the phone i quickly backed off to an hour later in that conversation i learned that a standard appointment is minutes we got the standard bozo treatment that is we were called back by an aide who scheduled a meeting with us in order to determine that we were not bozos and to familiarize himself with the material and to screen it to make sure that it was appropriate to take the senators time with that material well i got allocated hour with sen murrays aide and we ended up talking to him for minutes with us ending the meeting and him still listening we covered a lot of ground and only a little tiny bit was dcx specific most of it was a single stage reusable vehicle primer there was another woman there who took copius quantities of notes on every topic that we brought up but with murray being new we wanted to entrench ourselves as non corporate aligned i e not speaking for boeing local citizens interentested in space so we spent a lot of time covering the benifits of lower cost access to leo solar power satellites are a big focus here so we hit them as becoming feasible with lower cost access and we hit the environmental stand on that we hit the tourism angle and i left a copy of the patric collins tourism paper with side notes being that everyone who goes into space and sees the atmosphere becomes more of an environmentalist esp after seeing the smog over l a we hit on the benifits of studying bone decalcification which is more pronounced in space and said that that had potential to lead to understanding of and maybe a cure for osteoporosis we hit the education whereby kids get enthused by space but as they get older and find out that they havent a hop in hell of actually getting there they go on to other fields with low cost to orbit the chances they might get there someday would provide greater incentive to hit the harder classes needed we hit a little of the get nasa out of the operational launch vehicle business angle we hit the lower cost of satellite launches gps navigation personal communicators tellecommunications new services etc jobs provided in those sectors jobs provided building the thing balance of trade improvement etc we mentioned that skypix would benifit from lower launch costs we left the paper on what technologies needed to be invested in in order to make this even easier to do and he asked questions on this point we ended by telling her that we wanted her to be aware that efforts are proceeding in this area and that we want to make sure that the results from these efforts are not lost much like condor or majellan and most importantly we asked that she help fund further efforts along the lines of lowering the cost to leo in the middle we also gave a little speal about the lunar resource data purchase act and the guy filed it separately he was very interested in it he asked some questions about it and seemed like he wanted to jump on it and contact some of the people involved with it so something may actually happen immediatly there the last two things we did were to make sure that they knew that we knew a lot of people in the space arena here in town and that they could feel free to call us any time with questions and if we didn t know the answers that we would see to it that they questions got to people who really did know the answers then finally we asked for an appointment with the senator herself he said that we would get on the list and he also said that knowing her this would be something that she would be very interested in although they do have a time problem getting her scheduled since she is only in the state week out of these days all in all we felt like we did a pretty good job john
