The following are my thoughts on a meeting that I, Hugh Kelso, and Bob Lilly
had with an aide of Sen. Patty Murrays.  We were there to discuss SSTO, and
commercial space.  This is how it went...



After receiving a packet containing a presentation on the benifits of SSTO,
I called and tried to schedule a meeting with our local Senator (D) Patty
Murray, Washington State.  I started asking for an hour, and when I heard
the gasp on the end of the phone, I quickly backed off to 1/2 an hour.
Later in that conversation, I learned that a standard appointment is 15 minutes.

We got the standard bozo treatment.  That is, we were called back by an aide,
who scheduled a meeting with us, in order to determine that we were not
bozos, and to familiarize himself with the material, and to screen it, to 
make sure that it was appropriate to take the senators time with that material.

Well, I got allocated 1/2 hour with Sen. Murrays aide, and we ended up talking
to him for 45 minutes, with us ending the meeting, and him still listening.
We covered a lot of ground, and only a little tiny bit was DCX specific.  
Most of it was a single stage reusable vehicle primer.  There was another
woman there who took copius quantities of notes on EVERY topic that
we brought up.

But, with Murray being new, we wanted to entrench ourselves as non-corporate
aligned (I.E. not speaking for boeing) local citizens interentested in space.
So, we spent a lot of time covering the benifits of lower cost access to
LEO.  Solar power satellites are a big focus here, so we hit them as becoming 
feasible with lower cost access, and we hit the environmental stand on that.
We hit the tourism angle, and I left a copy of the patric Collins Tourism
paper, with side notes being that everyone who goes into space, and sees the
atmosphere becomes more of an environmentalist, esp. after SEEING the smog
over L.A.  We hit on the benifits of studying bone decalcification (which is 
more pronounced in space, and said that that had POTENTIAL to lead to 
understanding of, and MAYBE a cure for osteoporosis.  We hit the education 
whereby kids get enthused by space, but as they get older and find out that
they havent a hop in hell of actually getting there, they go on to other
fields, with low cost to orbit, the chances they might get there someday 
would provide greater incentive to hit the harder classes needed.

We hit a little of the get nasa out of the operational launch vehicle business
angle.  We hit the lower cost of satellite launches, gps navigation, personal
communicators, tellecommunications, new services, etc...  Jobs provided
in those sectors.

Jobs provided building the thing, balance of trade improvement, etc..
We mentioned that skypix would benifit from lower launch costs.

We left the paper on what technologies needed to be invested in in order
to make this even easier to do.  And he asked questions on this point.

We ended by telling her that we wanted her to be aware that efforts are
proceeding in this area, and that we want to make sure that the
results from these efforts are not lost (much like condor, or majellan),
and most importantly, we asked that she help fund further efforts along
the lines of lowering the cost to LEO.

In the middle we also gave a little speal about the Lunar Resource Data 
Purchase act, and the guy filed it separately, he was VERY interested in it.
He asked some questions about it, and seemed like he wanted to jump on it,
and contact some of the people involved with it, so something may actually
happen immediatly there.

The last two things we did were to make sure that they knew that we
knew a lot of people in the space arena here in town, and that they
could feel free to call us any time with questions, and if we didn't know
the answers, that we would see to it that they questions got to people who
really did know the answers.

Then finally, we asked for an appointment with the senator herself.  He
said that we would get on the list, and he also said that knowing her, this
would be something that she would be very interested in, although they
do have a time problem getting her scheduled, since she is only in the
state 1 week out of 6 these days.

All in all we felt like we did a pretty good job.