[eagle] Re: 2008 Symposium deadline

[Lyle Johnson]

Hello Frank!

I don't mind being controversial :-)

My take on all things AMSAT for the past couple of years is:

1) ITAR prevents us from any meaningful exchange of ideas, projects or 
design with any non-U.S. citizen.  While there are ways to do this, they 
assume very deep pockets and a large full-time staff devoted to 
satisfying unreasonable, unrealistic and arbitrary government demands.

Feedback from meetings with people who ought to know strongly suggest 
that while Amateur satellites are not the intent of the ITAR rules 
(duh!), absolutely no one in a position to help us is willing to go on 
record with that interpretation.

The practical result is that ITAR has killed the IHU3 since it was 
dependent on cooperation from a non-NA group.  P3E and whatever Eagle 
was to have been were dependent on the IHU3.  The impact is pretty easy 
to extrapolate.

2) For the same reasons, ITAR prevents us from making a presentation at 
any AMSAT Symposium with any technical content except perhaps the most 
general.  If there is technical content, we have to be ready to cite 
chapter and verse of the publicly available source of anything we utter 
that might be construed as potentially revealing of any level of 
technology that might possibly be applied to any spacecraft in orbit or 
supporting such a spacecraft on the ground.

Unless of course we clear the building of all non-U.S. citizens.

Sigh.

73,

Lyle KK7P (who now does terrestrial stuff)