President’s Report to Our Members
on The State of The Society
for our 9th Annual Membership Meeting
August 16, 2017
The state of the Society is that the Society is not where it should be but it has a plan for improvement and we are entering a time where Lunar development is at least not taking a back seat to other priorities in space. An opportunity is presenting itself and the leadership of the Society is working to sieze it.
Membership
As of 08/09/17, Moon Society membership stood at 89 members, down from 136 a year ago, an 34% decrease.
Treasury Report and Project Funding Proposals
The Society has funds available in the amount of $33,000, approximately flat from a year ago.
The Challenge of Projects
There are several great projects that the Society has approved to be done and many that could be done. The limitation on accomplishing these goals is the volunteer manpower to actually do the work. Increasing the participation by and value returned to our membership is our largest goal for the coming year.
Website
Our website is now running on a Drupal 7 platform and is basically stable. The goal of the coming year is to update the design of both the main Moon Society web presence as well as the Lunarpedia. The Web has changed a lot over the years and many potential members use their mobile devices as their primary computing system. The Society must go to where the members are.
Other Web Assets
Our Facebook page and the Lunarpedia project continue to be one of our most popular portals.
Moon Miner’s Manifesto
Moon Miner’s Manifesto completed its 25th year of continuous publication, ten issues a year, with the November 2011 issue, #250. While individual back issues (in electronic pdf file format # 145 forward) remain username/password protected, all the non-time sensitive articles from the first 21 years are republished in the MMM Classics series, freely available to anyone. Peter Kokh, President Emeritus, has retired, but we will resume publishing soon but only electronically.
Collaborations
There is much going on lunar related in the space industry. Most of it is public but some is being done by private companies.
National Space Society
Our collaboration with the NSS is still strong but NSS has picked up the bulk of the effort, especially programming the lunar track at ISDC recently. This should change during the coming year.
The Waypaver Foundation
Our new President, Michael Mealling, is also the CEO of the Waypaver Foundation. Waypaver is a non-profit foundation working to fund specific scientific, political, and economic work necessary to remove any obstacles to lunar settlement. The proposal on the table to both the Moon Society board and the Waypaver board is to create a closer collaboration to solve some of the Society’s volunteer shortfalls. Waypaver also has relationships with the Moon Village effort with ESA, the Lunar Marketplace within the FAA, and other small groups around the world. Waypaver is proposing to help the Society with a site redesign, combining its Lunar Settlement Index with the Lunarpedia, and providing a conduit for sponsored research.
Chapters
Chapters are a primary way to organize members in support of the Society and its Goals. The past two years has not seen much support for chapters from the Society. This should change over the next year as chapters become involved in fundraising for targeted research, lobbying efforts within Congress, and local outreach.
Policy and Positions
During the next few weeks the Society will be developing policies, position papers, and announcements concerning:
- Moon Village – Providing support and volunteers for efforts within ESA and affiliated groups in support of the Moon Village Association.
- NASA Deep Space Gateway – A position paper on the Society’s view of NASA’s Deep Space Gateway and how best to support commercial development of the Moon.
- ULA’s cislunar1000 – A paper on ULA’s efforts and support from the Society on the technology needed to make that effort successful.
Looking Forward
My goal as President is to ‘reboot’ the Moon Society and give it the resources and stature of other space advocacy organizations. 2017 and 2018 are not about ‘rebuilding’ but ‘reinventing’. What isn’t working will be stopped. What is working will be amplified. The Moon Society has some incredible resources and people and it is an incredible time to be focused on Earth’s nearest neighbor.