The National Space Society (NSS) is an international nonprofit 501(c)(3) educational and scientific organization specializing in space advocacy. It is a member of the Independent Charities of America and an annual participant in the Combined Federal Campaign.
The National Space Society's vision is: People living and working in thriving communities beyond the Earth, and the use of the vast resources of space for the dramatic betterment of humanity. — National Space Society vision statement
The Society supports manned space missions as well as unmanned space missions, which are remotely controlled or robotic space probes by both the public (e.g., NASA, Russian Federal Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and private sector (e.g., Ansari X Prize, Transformational Space, Scaled Composites, etc.) organizations.
The National Space Society was established in the United States on March 28, 1987, by the merger of the National Space Institute, founded by Dr. Wernher von Braun, and the L5 Society, based on the concepts of Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill.
The society enjoys the support of, and is served by, an elected volunteer Board of Directors and Board of Governors.
The chairman of the society's Board of Governors is former ABC-TV 20/20 host and news anchor Hugh Downs. The chairman of the Board of Directors is Kirby Ikin. The current Executive Director of NSS as of January 2012 is Lt. Col Paul Damhousse, Ret.
Read more about National Space Society: International Space Development Conference, NSS Chapters Network, Awards, Affiliations
Famous quotes containing the words national, space and/or society:
“All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.”
—Carson McCullers (1917–1967)
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
“I’ve thought about how, were we to suddenly receive the freedom about which we talk so much when we spar with one another, we would not know what to do with it at first. We would expend it on denouncing one another in the newspapers for spying, for love of the ruble, we would frighten society with protestations that we have no people, no science, no literature, nothing at all!”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)