Kurt is on board. Tam is as well, but I think he's down in Houston if it's who I'm thinking of.

My co-chair, Carol Johnson, is a member of the Mars Society. I'm kind of leaving the Mars track in her hands so that I can focus on the Moon track (and leave the Space Transport track to George at HQ). April and Derek Andreas appear to be leading the efforts of the DMS. We've suggested Steve Squyres as a potential Honorary Track Chair, unless someone has a more compelling suggestion.

The preparations are going great. We've started circulating our Sponsorship & Underwriting package, we've got a basic layout of what tracks we're slotting for what rooms at what times, and we've got a long list of suggested speakers for HQ to target.

Right now we're working on our policies and procedures (Volunteers must work X hours to get free admission for the rest of the day, Speakers get free admission on day of talk but must register for other days, and so on), and we're ramping up for the Call for Papers, which I've targeted for no later than the end of the November (the T-6 months point).

The art show is moving forward, meals are being planned and priced, we continue to build awareness locally with handouts (buttons and postcards) and display boards at our outreach events and other opportunities. We had two folks that made sure flyers were at WorldCon recently. We've got a panel and display table at FenCon coming up next week. World Space Week is early October, and there's something else later in October. We're also going to try to get on TV over the holidays when we make our Santa Space Toy Drive donation to the local Santa's Helpers program (this will be our third year).

The big thing I'm sweating right now is getting displays of hardware to exhibit at the conference. This is key to getting the general public to turn out for the event. I won't consider it a success otherwise, as I'm not terribly interested in throwing a party just for space advocacy insiders, irrespective of their stripes.

The public is key to our space efforts, and showing them what we are doing in the space field goes a long way towards garnering their interest. To the extent that I can make this a Space Expo I will. These won't be museum pieces, they will be real-time space stuff. We've got an exhibit area that the general public can see for free, but the really cool hardware will be in the registered-only area. I've also cleverly set it up so that people registering have to walk through the free exhibit area to register; value added for the exhibitors.

And there are about a milion other details I'm juggling at the moment. I'm actually pretty happy with where we are this far out from the conference date (May 24-28, 2007).

See Chris, you had to ask...