2009 Symposium Banquet Speaker

Our AMSAT 40th Anniversary Banquet Speaker

Martin Collins is a curator in the Space History Division at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where he’s been for more than twenty years. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is the author/editor of several books on space history and on science, technology, and society in the twentieth century.

He curates the National Air and Space Museum’s civilian applications satellites collection that includes weather, remote sensing, and communications satellites and related technologies. He has contributed to a series of Museum exhibits, and was primary author of the exhibition catalog, Space Race: The U.S.-USSR Competition to Reach the Moon. His recent efforts have explored the use of new media for exhibitions and other museum presentations.

On the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Sputnik, he was editor of After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age, which included pages and photos on the history of Project OSCAR. He was instrumental in arranging the display of OSCAR 1 at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center, along with the Naval Academy’s PCSat amateur radio satellite. He also arranged the acquisition of AMSAT’s MicroSat mechanical test model, which went on display next to the Smithsonian Club station NN3SI at the National Museum of American History in 2004, just in time for AMSAT’s 35th Anniversary Annual Meeting.

The title of his talk at the AMSAT Banquet will be: Making the Space Age: The First Fifty Years.

Submitted by: Gould Smith

Updated: 28 Aug, 09