The Range Head,
January 1999

by Jack Hagerty, LUNAR #002

GOIN' OUT IN STYLE

Those of you who couldn't make December launch missed a good one. We finished the year in fine style with a busy launch and absolutely perfect flying weather.

For once this year we were on the good side of an advancing storm front and had a bright, sunny and completely windless morning. To show how close we cut it, 24 hours later the weather was overcast, windy and temperatures in the high 30's. The biggest surprise, though, came when I totaled up the flight cards. Like I said it was a busy morning, but I didn't think excessively so. The launch wait was never more than 10 minutes or so, but the flight cards showed a total of 211 flights! I counted them three times to make sure. This is close to a record. How did we do that so smoothly without the big crowds?

A TIME OF RENEWAL

Well, it's that time again. Enclosed in this issue is a membership form. It's time to renew for everyone who wants to fly with us this year. And while you are all filling out your renewals (you ARE filling them out, right?) it's time for me to renew our charter with the NAR. I can handle all of the mundane paper work, but I need some input from you folks, just like last year and the year before that. I need to list on our renewal all of our members who are also NAR members and whether or not you're insured. This is supposed to be one of the normal pieces of info you fill in on the application when joining LUNAR, but sometimes people join the NAR after joining LUNAR and forget to put the NAR number on their form when renewing so the member database gets out of sync. If you are a NAR member, could you please reply to me with the following four pieces of info:

Name
NAR number
Age division (A, B or C)
Insured/not insured

You can respond by e-mail, surface mail, fax or phone. Many of you have already responded to me by e-mail. Thank you if you've done so (and received a confirmation from me), you don't have to do it again.

JANUARY MEETING

Be sure to make the January meeting if you can. We'll be voting for this year's officers and there are some changes which I'll get to further down. After the business portion, I'll be showing a promotional video for Rotary Rocket, a reusable Single Stage To Orbit cargo rocket being designed in Redwood City. If we can't have access to the video player (it's in the briefing room which may not be available to us) then I may carry out my threat to show my slides from NARAM last August.

PASSING THE TORCH

In last July's column I quoted Kevin Wickhart from his "Spare Parts" column in Sport Rocketry. He was writing about "passing the torch," the means by which any organization survives long term. Well, we're about to see how well that works in practice. Many of LUNAR's founding members (the ones with single digit membership numbers) are feeling that they've put in their six years of effort and want to transition to being just regular members. Lynn Kissel (#009) has handed off the newsletter to Tom Hail starting with this issue, although he (Lynn) will continue to maintain the online version.

At December's launch Warren Massey (#007) told me that he wants to harvest the fruits of his labors and become a regular anonymous member. Warren's contributions to the club cannot be overstated. While not meaning to detract from the substantial efforts of others, it's fair to say that everything tangible about the club is Warren's. Many of you have commented on our high quality equipment and how well organized we are. This is a direct result of Warren's absolute genius for organization and process flow. As equipment manager, he designed and built two generations of our launch equipment plus codifying our launch procedures. Our field layout, which allows one set of pads to rack while the other launches (a modification of the NAR "misfire alley" layout) is basically his, although much modified by board discussion. As membership chairman he designed all of the forms we use plus the membership cards and the roster spreadsheet we use to track all of your memberships. Finally, a more pedestrian service he performs for the club is manning the hotline, recording the outgoing information messages and passing on the incoming messages to the appropriate board member.

Since I know we'll never find someone to take over all three jobs, I'm putting out a request for people to step forward and each take over one of them. Actually, some jobs have already been filled. At the December launch Tony Cooper stepped forward to take over membership. This also comes with a nomination to take over Warren's member-at-large position on the board (which will be voted on with the rest of the board nominees at the January meeting).

The biggest need is for a new equipment manager. There's really not too much to do since the equipment is built and operates so well. The main duties are to pull the trailer out to set up for the launch and put it away afterward. A truck or van with a 2" ball is obviously an asset here. Outside of that, there's just the occasional maintenance requirement like replacing clips on the ends of leads. Bill Orvis has already volunteered to take over the maintenance end of things, so all we need is someone with a trailer hitch to handle the field setup. You don't have to attend every launch, but you'd be responsible for finding someone to cover the times you don't make it.

The last job is to take over the hotline. For this we'd prefer someone in Livermore since the number is pretty widely distributed and it has to stay in town if we're going to keep it. The club would pay for transferring the number and the monthly service charge. The duties here are pretty light, just updating the outgoing message with the latest launch/meeting announcements, and passing on the incoming messages to the appropriate people.

While he hasn't said anything to me yet, I suspect that Mark Weiss (#001) might want to start easing out of the treasurer's job over the next year. If so, that means that LUNAR will enter the new millennium with a new generation of officers. How smoothly this happens will indicate how well the club can survive long term.

GETTING WIRED

Our outgoing paper 'Clips editor (hmmm, that didn't come out right), uh, our retiring editor of the paper version of the 'Clips, Lynn Kissel, has been working on a project for the past few months that you should all appreciate. He's been setting up an automated list server to allow LUNAR members to contact each other electronically. There are three lists:

1) LUNAR-announce -- announcements for the entire membership whose electronic address we have. This list is moderated (currently by myself and Lynn) to keep the volume of unsolicited mail down.

2) LUNAR-general -- general discussions among the membership. This is an unmoderated list for anyone to post to at any time. It's a good way to ask tech questions, arrange rides and discuss the nuances of the hobby. Since the volume will probably be high, only people who have subscribed to the list will receive it.

3) LUNARclips -- LUNAR'clips mailings. Pretty much the same as 1), but for announcements just regarding the newsletter (deadlines, letting you know when the online version is available, etc.)

We're still working out some domain forwarding details with Dave Redell, the webmeister of our "lunar.org site". Right now the lists are running through best.com (Lynn's ISP), but eventually you can reach them through the lunar.org domain. If you want to test them out, you can try accessing them by adding "@lists.best.com" to the end of the list name (e.g. the general list would be LUNAR-general@lists.best.com). Don't get too comfortable with it though, since you'll have to change to the "lunar.org" domain once we get that straightened out.

Information date: Jan. 24, 1999 lk