About the FISO Telecon Series

 

The FISO (Future In-Space Operations) Telecon Series was begun in 2006, by the then-active FISO Working Group. The FISO telecon series was designed as an effective outreach effort to bring space technology, engineering, and science to the widespread space community with presentations from leaders in their field. Although the telephone line telecon can host a limited number of participants, who are explicitly invited via our listserve, we are pleased to archive the slides and audio from those telecons for the general public.

 

This effort has been described in some detail by founding Co-Chairs Harley Thronson (retired NASA GSFC) and Dan Lester (retired University of Texas, Exinetics) in a 2013 article in The Space Review.

 

Thronson was awarded a Goddard Space Flight Center Astrophysics Science Division ÒPeer AwardÓ for contributing to this effort in 2012. This award recognized the FISO Telecon Series as an innovative and thus far unique forum, providing researchers, industry leaders, and policy makers information on Òhot topicsÓ of strategic importance. The general public gets access to all of this.


Over the years, we have been joined by several aerospace workers as co-chairs. In April 2019, we were joined by Dallas Bienhoff (retired Boeing, CSDC). In August 2023, we were joined by John Bradford (SpaceWorks).

 

While in its early years, the FISO telecon was an informal partnership with NASA with NASA hosting the listserve and the telecon, as of October 2016 there are no NASA resources or funds that are being used on its behalf. Although there has been misinformation that has gone somewhat viral, this is NOT a NASA telecon, and never has been.


For its first ten years, we very much appreciated that the FISO telecon website was hosted at the University Texas. Network security rules there are kind of anal, and we have migrated to a commercial server that offers extra opportunities. We are hoping that the migration will be reasonably transparent to those trying to link to the presentations over the last decade in our 8GB archive.


Although the telephone part of the FISO telecon isn't public (and
here's why) we make an effort to publicly archive both the presentation slides and the audio, making it easy for anyone to podcast the presentations. Usually this podcast is available within half an hour of the conclusion of the telecon. We have more than five hundred presentations in this archive, from space agency, industry, and academic leaders in the aerospace field, going back more than twelve years. Presentations are downloaded from this archive from users all over the world, at a rate of thousands per month for unique downloads (we don't count multiple downloads from individual IPs). Please don't hesitate to publicly share the URL for our archive page. That particular archive page is just for the last year or two. The archive pages for the years before that are linked to at the bottom of it. If you want to dial in to the telecon, we'd be happy to invite you, if you are a space professional (science, technology, engineering). Please contact us at fiso@spiritastro.net .