Only a few days left until SpaceUp San Diego! If you won’t be with us in person this weekend, you can still participate.

Webcasting

Each year we try to webcast SpaceUp San Diego on Spacevidcast. This year it’s more difficult for a variety of reasons, but we’re still committed to webcasting all the sessions in the main session room (Pod One).

A dedicated volunteer will monitor the Spacevidcast chat room during each session, relaying your questions and comments to the room. Check the agenda for an outline of our schedule both days.

Pod One is also where those wonderful T minus 5 talks will be. Tune in during the Saturday night party from 7pm to 9pm Pacific time.

T-shirts, Patches, Stickers

One of my favorite parts of organizing SpaceUp is designing the swag, the t-shirts, patches, stickers, and other fun stuff our attendees get. This year it features wonderful art by Joi!

You can get the whole set of swag by signing up as an Online Attendee before Saturday. After the event, individual items will be available for sale at the Space Travelers Emporium.

The past few weeks have been all about logistics. You’re getting registered, booking your hotel and arranging transportation. We’re setting up the food, ordering the fun swag, and finding sponsors to help cover it all.

Now comes the fun part: getting together to talk about space!

We’ll have a whole weekend to talk—and we’ll need it!—but one set of talks is special: T minus 5. They’re as short as a Youtube video, as fun as karaoke, and as nerdy as a 3D-printed turbopump.

Get more details on the T minus 5 Talks page.

Anyone is encouraged to give a talk, and that includes YOU. A few that have been proposed already:

• Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society has something to say to the former 9th planet: “Get Over It, Pluto.”
• Francis French of the San Diego Air & Space Museum will tell us why the 12 guys who went around the moon had a better time than those who landed.
• This year I’m giving a talk, too, about how we can “Reboot the Franchise”, because newspace needs a new Trek.

What do YOU want to talk about? Write down a title and a sentence describing your idea and email it to me this week. Easy peasy! We have room for lots of talks, so don’t be shy.

Two weeks until SpaceUp San Diego, and just look at this attendee list! Already we have engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, project managers, historians, educators, students, advocates, and kids participating.

Thanks to sponsors like Measured Voice, XCOR, and Ansir Innovation Center, we’ve been able to keep registration fees lower than last year while still covering our costs. We still need a few more sponsors to make this an outstanding weekend, though.

We Still Need Sponsors

If you know a company that wants to get their name in front of all those amazing people, please ask them to sponsor SpaceUp San Diego. It costs less than attending an ordinary space conference, and your name gets promoted online, at the event, and (at some levels) on the t-shirts and webcast!

SpaceUp is an all-volunteer event put on by a non-profit organization. Every dime you donate goes straight to the attendees: for better food, smoother webcasting, and the little touches that make everyone more comfortable.

We’ll accept sponsorships right up until the opening session, but if you want your logo on the t-shirt we need to hear from you before Wednesday, January 25th.

For more information, contact sponsors@spaceup.org soon!

It looks like the future snuck up on us while we weren’t looking. Is it really almost 2012 already? It certainly looks like it, with private spacecraft in production, robots heading back to Mars, personal satellite kits, Earth-sized exoplanets, and more asteroids than you can shake a stick at!

Luckily we have this SpaceUp thing down pat, so there’s a place for us to get together and talk about it all. We have a great venue, a great weekend, and all the tools and people we need to make this thing happen. All we need now is you! First, details:

What:
SpaceUp San Diego 2012
(see the Agenda page for details)

Where:
Ansir Innovation Center
4685 Convoy Street #210, San Diego

When:
February 4-5, 2012
(starting a bit before noon on Saturday, ending in mid-afternoon on Sunday)

If you’re available that weekend, up for a jaunt to beautiful San Diego, and want to roll up your sleeves with the people who are making 21st-century space exploration happen, then register now to make sure you have a seat.

See you there!

We need your help!

SpaceUp organizers Mike Doornbos, Dennis Bonilla, Chris Radcliff, Tim Bailey (also of Yuri’s Night), and Jen Scheer (also of the Space Tweep Society) are teaming up with astronaut Ron Garan to show the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference what an awesome group of space enthusiasts can do when united by social media.

The proposed panel is called How to Win Friends and Influence Space Exploration. As the description says:

Learn why these people got so passionately involved in space, how they became good friends over the Internet, and what they’ve created to make measurable change toward a more awesome tomorrow.

SXSW judges will ultimately decide whether to include our panel, but you can help by voting for us or adding your comment to the panel picker page.

Whew! That took longer than I thought. Most of that time was spent looking for my GO FAST button; turns out it was buried under a big pile of to-do items and “while you were out” messages. Who knew?

Now we’re ready to go! We have a great venue, a firm date, a great team, and a solid plan. All we need now is you! First, details:

What:
SpaceUp San Diego 2011
(see the How It Works page for details)

Where:
The Loft at UC San Diego

When:
February 12-13, 2011
(starting a bit before noon on Saturday, ending in mid-afternoon on Sunday)

If you’re available that weekend, up for a jaunt to beautiful San Diego, and want to roll up your sleeves with the people who are making 21st-century space exploration happen, then register now to make sure you have a seat. (Seriously, we only have a limited number of them, and no overflow room.)

You may have noticed that this is the same weekend as SpaceUp Houston. If you’re planning to fly, we encourage you to go to Houston that weekend. (They have an astronaut on the guest list!) We’re also working on ways to connect the two events, possibly using some Internets and/or point-to-point suborbital rockets. Stay tuned.

I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. *

The first SpaceUp was awesome! I’m still recovering and catching up afterward, but the glow from all that concentrated amazingness is propelling me forward. While the wiki is getting filled in, take a look at the photos and videos that have already been posted.

More are available on Spacevidcast and Youtube, with links (as we get them filled in) collected on the wiki.

I have absolutely no time to write coherently, but I just had to pass along this update on Hardware Alley from Jesse Clark:

We have several new additions to Hardware Alley.  As you know Paul Breed of Unreasonable Rocket is bringing their lander [pictured at right –ed],  GLXP is bringing their demo rover “Rovey” and SDASM will display a half dozen artifacts.  New Hardware Alley items: David Barnhart will be bringing a full scale model of their nanosat along with several other models and Eric Robinson will bring hardware he has developed and a model of the Dawn mission satellite.

By the way, those “half dozen artifacts” include a Space Shuttle tire and the flight data recorder from Columbia. All these things will be arrayed in the Pavilion, near where the sessions are. That’s just plain cool.

I’m not sure why, but the word “passel” seems to be popping into my head lately. You know, a group of people or things, a pack. A bunch. A passel. I just like the way it sounds.

As of today (when I finally got around to updating the official list), we have a passel of new sponsors for SpaceUp. I’m not going to tell you what each one gave us, but it ranges from a passel of bags, to a passel of stickers, to a passel of mentions, to an (ever-helpful) passel of money. (Though I’m pretty sure I should use “fistful” when describing money.)

Better than what they gave us (or more accurately, our attendees) is what they all mean to us. Look at that list! These are our friends in the community, the ones who we’d hang out with anyway, and we’re proud to be associated with each and every one of them.

So, when you’re hanging out at the Museum next weekend with your make-it-stop in one hand and make-it-go in the other, thinking about telescopes and rockets to the moon, or even if you’re watching it on SVC, give a little nod to the people who made it all possible.

Thanks, sponsors!

(And if you’re wondering: yes, we still could use a few more sponsors. We’ll be accepting sponsorships until Thursday the 25th. If you contact us by this weekend, we could even get your logo on the t-shirt.)