All bets will be off July 21-23 at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas as private industry and NASA representatives meet to tackle the challenges of returning humans to the Moon. “Return to the Moon VI: Reality Check,” managed by the nonprofit Space Frontier Foundation, has slapped a 10-year container around conference content in order to focus on near-term realities and leave traditional, idealized concepts behind.
“Return to the Moon VI” starts just two days following public release of NASA’s Space Exploration Architecture Study? a key document expected to restructure the exploration initiative at NASA and provide assessments of technologies called for in President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration.
“We’ll be very much in reality mode,” says Jeff Feige, conference chairman. “Our conference will be one of the very first chances entrepreneurs have to review the results of the study with the people who put it together, including NASA’s Chris Shank, one of the study team leaders. The programs assessed in the study are ones our participants have a stake in the Crew Exploration Vehicle that replaces the Space Shuttle, crew and cargo launch systems for a return to the Moon, and enabling technologies required to make all of that happen.”
Feige continues, “I believe NASA will not be able to pull off the President’s Vision for Space Exploration without some real out-of-the-box thinking. The entrepreneurs who are attending and presenting at this event are exactly whom NASA needs to be interacting with to succeed.” Panel discussions at the conference will feature a high degree of audience interaction, moderated by panel leaders such as Cris Guidi, Mike Hess, Dr. Terri Lomax and Michael Wargo of NASA, Paul Eckert of Boeing and Lon Rains of Space News. Other spot presenters include Brant Sponberg of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program, Tim Huddleston of the Aerospace Development Center, and Michael Mealling, founder of RocketForge.org.
For complete panel and presenter information, visit www.space-frontier.org.
