National Space Awareness Workshop 2012

United Nations Themed Afternoon Breakout Session!

This three-hour session will focus on Canada's involvement in the United Nations Working Group on the Long Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities (LTSOSA), which is part of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOS).

Topics of discussion include:

           - space utilization supporting sustainable development on Earth
           - space debris, space Operations and tools to support collaborative Space Situational Awareness
           - space weather
           - regulatory regimes and guidance for actors In the space arena

The outcome from the working session, including viewpoints and recommendations, are planned to be submitted to the CSA and UN COPUOS LTSOSA for consideration.

NSAW 2012 welcomes Eric Choi!

Eric Choi is a Toronto-based aerospace engineer, writer and editor. He has a bachelor's degree in engineering science and a master's degree in aerospace engineering, both from the University of Toronto, and an MBA from York University. Over the course of his aerospace engineering career, he has worked on a number of space missions including the Phoenix Mars Lander, the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, the RADARSAT-1 Earth-observation satellite and the MOPITT instrument on the Terra satellite. He is an alumnus of the International Space University and a frequent visiting lecturer who is also the current alumni representative on the ISU Board of Trustees, having previous served on the past executives of both the Canadian and American alumni associations. In 2009, he was one of the Top 40 finalists (out of 5,351 applicants) in the Canadian Space Agency's astronaut recruitment campaign.

As a writer and editor, he was the first recipient of the Isaac Asimov Award for his novelette "Dedication", which was published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and later reprinted in Japanese translation for Toru Nakamura's book The Astronaut From Wyoming and Other Stories. His other work has appeared in Footprints, Northwest Passages, Space Inc., Tales from the Wonder Zone, Northern Suns, Tesseracts6, Arrowdreams and Science Fiction Age magazine. With Derwin Mak, he co-edited The Dragon and the Stars, the Aurora Award winning collection of speculative fiction by authors of the Chinese diaspora. "Making Mars a Nicer Place", a non-fiction essay that examines the terraforming of Mars as it is portrayed in science fiction, appears in the book Rocket Science and online at TheSpaceReview.com. His next book project is Carbide Tipped Pens, a hard SF anthology that he will co-edit with Ben Bova.

We look forward to meeting Eric in London!

NSAW 2012 welcomes Robert Godwin!

Robert Godwin is the Space Curator at the Canadian Air & Space Museum. He is also the owner and founder of Apogee Space Books. He has written or edited over 100 books including the award winning series "The NASA Mission Reports". Robert has appeared on dozens of radio and television programs in Canada, the USA and England as an expert on, not only music, but also space exploration. His books have been discussed on CNN, the CBC, the BBC and CBS 60 Minutes. He produced the first ever virtual reality panoramas of the Apollo lunar surface photography and the first multi-camera angle movie of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. His latest book "New Horizons" expands on that previous ground-breaking work. We look forward to meeting Robert in London! More information on Robert.

NSAW 2012 Logo is Complete. What do you think?
Along with all of the technical challenges that came along with this, there were some non-technical one, such as designing an emblem for the workshop.

The logo depicts an image of Canada's first satellite, the Alouette, in orbit. We felt that this was appropriate since the workshop is focusing on all of Canada's space achievement in the past 50 years marking the anniversary of the launch of this satellite. The peripheral of the patch features the name, location and year of the workshop. It went through several iterations to get to its current stage. The logo concept was provided by Ken, with professional designer expertise given by Henry Kuzmick (www.henrykuzmick.com) at fiverr.com.

Absolutely great service at a very reasonable cost. Please leave comments on what you think of the logo!

NSAW 2012 Website Launched!
The NSAW 2012 website is up an running! Social features are included so you can share, tweet and follow for latest updates. The news articles include a Facebook comment feature so you can share your thought on each of them and get in touch with others. For twitter, include #NSAW2012 in your tweets for it to be picked up on the main page. Also, if you see any errors, please report them to nsaw2012@gmail.com