Damn I'm tired and I think the cookie tried to do me in ... LOL.

Final panel was on re-entry. We got to watch the heads up display and hear the conversation of the last shuttle mission return that Scott Lindsay flew. It was fun watching the speed and altitude meters drop and then the commentary about the cloud cover. There isn't supposed to be a cloud ceiling lower than 8000 feet on a shuttle landing. Apparently,  if the entire area isn't socked in with clouds, it doesn't count. The shuttle came out of the clouds at about 3500 feet altitude and the pilot was less than happy. However, the landing was successful and well done.

The panel before that was on Intellectual Property and how such things are handled by the patent office, by a gentleman  who started out as a chiropractor and by the financial officer of Xcor. The single agreement was to get someone who knew what they were doing to handle the major work of protecting the invention process and the patent/trademark/trade secret process. I have no idea what a trade secret process is.

Also discussed was whether patenting outside the US could be problematic for a patent in the US. Answer, yes.

Apparently Sir Richard Branson was at Spaceport America's dedication yesterday with White Knight and Space Ship 2. They returned to Nevada during the opening comments of the Symposium this morning. <sigh> One of these days I will get to see the man in person from a distance, but not today. Nor is his second in command on Virgin Galactic in evidence.

However, as a finale to today's meetings, Robert Bigelow was kind enough to have the water engine demonstrated. Ignition! Noisy! I got pix of it prior to firing but not during since we were inside and it was way noisy!!!

Will get more pix of Bigelow's models tomorrow. There's a silent auction for two of his models, but I sure as hell cannot afford to compete. <sigh> They are beautiful.

Well, that's all for today. I'll be back tomorrow with day two of



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Much like my fan fiction, old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway!

    Archives

    October 2011

    Categories

    All