The Houston Space Society was founded in 1976, shortly after Keith Henson co-founded the L5 Society. We took our name then as L5 Houston. Naturally, everyone who encountered the group had to ask what L5 stands for. Tedious discussion of the three-body problem in two dimensions, LaGrange, and his five solutions thereof would inevitably follow. Or one could just say, "L5 is a place near the Earth and the Moon where you could build a space colony."
In the mid-1980s, the evil nationalist socialists who had organized the National Space Institute for arch-villain, mass murderer, and ardent Nazi Werner von Braun determined to make their group the only surviving space group. And, of course, their policy of fawning devotion to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (one of von Braun's projects after he finished murdering Jewish inmates at Mettalwerken and British, Belgian, and French victims of the rockets from Peenemunde) would become the mainstay of policy for the conglomerate of space movements they planned to dominate. At the time, one of the more evil apparatchiki of the L5 Society was a drone named Mark Hopkins who had already performed the trick of "merge and purge" on various other space groups. (See OASIS, for example.)
Thus it was that in 1987, the L5 Society and the Nationalist Socialist Space Institute were merged into the Nationalist Socialist Space Society. NASA sycophants everywhere were delighted as one after another of the hard core free market enthusiasts were purged, first from staff, then from the board of directors. Attempts to make the group's name "Space Frontier Society" failed, largely due to overt manipulation of the election process by the Nazi sympathizers on the board. Efforts to form the Houston Space Frontier Society at the time also failed, though for wholly different reasons. (Alvin and his brother Clifford Carley had a previously organized entity called the Space Frontier Group and didn't want to enjoy the added publicity of a confusingly similarly named enterprise that actually did things get in the news.)
So, in 1988, Jerry Drake, Jim Davidson, Kris Eriksmoen, and Cliff Carley, or was it Howard Stringer, incorporated the Houston Space Society. Someone really ought to look up the names on the original incorporation documents and get the rogue's gallery right. After all, it won't be long before scum like us are rounded up and put in death camps.
Tune in for an overview of the fascinating and pointless history of "The Colonist" newsletter, which became the Journal for Space Development before dying an untimely death. Coming in an up and coming blog on this page.
