AIAA Houston Dinner Meeting: Blowout in the Gulf of Mexico: Lessons from Offshore Drilling that are Applicable to Aerospace

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Join AIAA Houston in welcoming Mr. Wayne Hale, Jr. as our speaker for the next AIAA dinner meeting on the evening of March 28th.
Deepwater offshore drilling rivals orbital space launch for engineering complexity, extreme environments, and technological challenge. The major failure in the Gulf of Mexico mirrors the Challenger and Columbia accidents. Mr. Hale will discuss the April 2010 Macondo accident as a case study for all involved in a high reliability organization looking to learn from past mistakes in order to prevent accidents in one’s own field of endeavor.

Please join us for an enlightening evening by sending your RSVP and making your dinner selection at the event page.

January/February Issue of Horizons Available

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The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Houston Section January / February 2013 Horizons newsletter is now available in high resolution and low resolution formats (PDF). Cover story: A Geologist and Curiosity on Mars by Dr. Dorothy Oehler, Tau Ceti Exoplanet Candidates by Wes Kelly of Triton Systems LLC, The Late Science Fiction Author Boris Strugatskij by Wes Kelly, Sarah Brightman on ISS by Sandrine Rolland, A Profile of Future Virgin Galactic Astronaut Dominique Teyssier, Science Fiction by Scientists (Dr. Larry Jay Friesen), and the 4th of 8 installments in the 1952 – 1954 series of space articles Man Will Conquer Space Soon! Wernher von Braun led this team of writers and artists for these articles in the weekly magazine Collier’s. Horizons is the first to reprint these page by page in high resolution.

February Dinner Meeting Recap and Upcoming Events

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February Dinner Meeting

Mrs. Romero did a fantastic job presenting about CPAS at the dinner meeting this past Thursday. See the charts (MS PowerPoint), video montage of the Generation 1 and 2 tests (Windows Media File), and another video (Windows Media File). More videos are available at the NASA CPAS YouTube Channel.

Upcoming Events

Yuri’s Night 5K Run/Walk

Volunteers are needed for this fantastic fundraising event on Saturday, April 20, 2013 for Houston’s Challenger Center for Space Education. Visit our event page for more information. ‎See the PDF version of the call for volunteers.

2013 Region IV Student Paper Conference

Save the date!

The Region IV Student Paper Conference will be hosted at Baylor University on April 27-28, 2013. For more information, visit the paper conference website at http://region4.aiaastudentconference.org.

See the Call for Papers (MS Word) for the conference.

AIAA Houston Dinner with CPAS – Save the Date!

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The AIAA Houston Section invites you to save an evening for dinner and a discussion of the Capsule Parachute Assembly System (CPAS) with Mrs. Leah Romero.  Mrs. Romero has participated in 10 CPAS drop tests as the lead analyst on the load train predictions which determine margins of safety for test support equipment.  Currently she is the team lead for implementing the Flight Analysis and Simulation Tool (FAST) and is co-authoring a paper discussing the cutting edge statistical methods CPAS uses to define the parachute model for the 2013 AIAA ADS conference.

See the event flyer (PDF).

This AIAA Houston dinner will be at the Gilruth with doors opening at 5:30pm on Thursday February 21st.

RSVP at the event page today!