Mach 30 Reporting In: September 2012

We dedicate our first weekly hangout each month to catching you up on what is happening at Mach 30.  We do project updates, share where we are stuck, and answer any questions that come up about Mach 30 or our work.

We also broadcast and record that hangout, so even if you can’t join us live, you can still stay in the loop.

If you’d rather not watch the whole meeting, or if you’d like to have easy access to the resources we discuss, you can access the meeting minutes here.

It’s not too late for feedback!

If you have questions or ideas we want to hear them.  Leave a comment below and a Mach 30 board member will answer as soon as we can.

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3 thoughts on “Mach 30 Reporting In: September 2012

  1. jstults

    Nice to hear about the progress on ODE; it’s a neat project.

    Do you guys usually buy your helilum from welding gas suppliers?

    Does the “ITAR Executive Desk Reference” have significantly differently info (hopefully more narrative/explanation) than the Annotated ITAR NDIA puts out? I’ve been following this export law blog lately just to get familiar with the jargon and current events.

    Wayne brings up a good point about the UK/Australia (Israel too); we already have signed/ratified defense trade and cooperation treaties for those three countries. The exemption for the UK community has been implemented, and the one for Australia is imenent (should be in effect later this year). Here’s the proposed rule changes for those exemptions. The proposed rules also have clearer document marking guidance than I’ve been able to find in the existing regulation.

    The basic rule of thumb seems to be “find the item on the USML or the CCL, if it’s on either of those lists, then you need to do your paperwork with State or Commerce respectively.”

    Reply
  2. jstults

    So I did some more reading of the documents on the State dept. website. It looks like the exepmtions for UK/Australia are focused on specific defense projects. Non-governmental organizations can join the treaty “community”, but they have to make a request to the government. I guess it depends on the specific implementation policies on whether they’d be approved or not.

    Reply
  3. J. Simmons

    Hey Josh,

    Those are great questions/comments. Sorry for the delay in replying, it is a board meeting weekend so there has been extra work to do around here.

    We are very excited to be (finally) nearing the public launch of ODE. We just got a new user who is publishing the documentation for his Scanning Tunneling Microscope (https://opendesignengine.net/projects/stm-ajstarr). How cool is that?

    I believe to date we have mostly shopped at welding gas (or similar) supply stores for helium. It turns out availability is somewhat regional, though the shortage is clearly global. I will see if I can get some more info from Adler on helium vendors and post it.

    The ITAR Desk Reference is basically a publication of the current rev of the ITAR legislation plus all of the amendments and notations on corrections to the published text. So, pretty different from the Annotated ITAR. Still, it is nice to have everything about the legalese all together in one place.

    As for international cooperation, I am still going to assume there is a decent amount of work there until proven otherwise just because I have heard so many horror stories about ITAR from first hand accounts. Still, I think it is pretty safe to say that working with volunteers and partners in close ally nations makes sense as a starting place when the time comes. The question is does that time come sooner or later.

    Either way, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

    Reply

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