kcarroll@utzoo.UUCP (Kieran A. Carroll) (06/17/83)
People in the Toronto area, take notice! The L5 Society will be holding a meeting on Tuesday, June 21, at 7:00 P.M. The location will be the Toronto Board of Education Building, at 155 College St., probably in the 6th floor auditorium. Apparently, the Toronto chapter of the Society has been idle for quite a while; this meeting is being held to help revive it. All are welcome to come. Included in the program is a slide show dealing with the Apollo program. Some of you (hopefully not many) will not know what the L5 Society is. For those people, a short introduction is in order. The L5 Society is a group of people who are interested in the opening up of the frontier of space. Their stated purpose is to be able to hold a meeting of the Society, before the turn of this century, aboard a space colony (probably in Earth orbit). A Likely location for such a colony is in one of the so-called Lagrange points, or areas of gravitational stability in the Earth-Moon gravitational system, first discovered by the mathematician Lagrange. There are 5 such points, of which only two (L4 and L5, located 60 degrees behind and ahead of the moon in its orbit around the earth) are asymptotically stable; hence the name of the Society, since present plans place the baseline colony at L5. The L5 Society is moderately active in the U.S., where it originated. It is organized into local chapters, which only recently have started to act together to achieve results (such as lobbying for pro-space- exploration bills in Washington). They publish a (monthly?) magazine, the L5 News, containing member correspondence, local chapter news, and most importantly, news of interest to anyone who supports space exploration. They have several projects in the works at the moment (including work on innovative launching systems); in general, they bend their efforts towards making space travel cheaper, and to finding ways to get an economic return from space industries and the like, so that their colony project will be economically more feasible. The Society has several chapters outside of the states (including one which recently started, in Waterloo, for those interested Ontarians who can't get into Toronto, regularly), and are hungry for membership. While this message is directed mostly towards people in the Toronto area, it occurs to me that there may be people in other areas who'd be interested in the Society. If so, mail me, and I'll post the address of the national headquarters of the Society. They can get you in touch with the chapter nearest you. By the way, if you were to look at the list of the Board of Directors for the Society, you'd probably see some names that you recognize. I don't have the list with me, but I beleive that Heinlein is there, and Pournelle. Note: I'm posting this two both sf-lovers and space, to reach all concerned. I apologize to anybody who recieves this twice... -Kieran A. Carroll ...decvax!utzoo!kcarroll