[All] ASIA-AQ Update

[Zavaleta, Jhony R. (ARC-SGP)]

Hello team,

Greetings the BKK international airport, where we await our flight to Kuala Lumpur for the final portion of the trip, as it is very likely that the trip to Taiwan will be reconsidered (pending further communication). In any case, I will head home this weekend from KL, only Jim and Tracy will go to Taiwan if everything works out in the next day or two.

Coordination with the Philippines and Korea are very strong, and there are a few changes that were determined while we are here. I’ll brief all th me sure managers in more detail when I return, but for now, we are tracking the following:

- The dates have shifted a bit. The first day of aircraft arrival at the first TDY location is February 1st.

- The first destination is now the Philippines, and it is looking like Clark will be the basing location.

- Customs in the Philippines is pretty bad, and the embassy won’t move a finger to assist us unless they have a charge code… for which we need an interagency agreement. I need to put together a list of tasks so that they can give us an estimate… lol of this will take time. They aren’t part of the ATA countries. Thailand is just as bad, but they are ATA members. We’ll have to work very closely with the instrument teams and AFRC to ensure we can fit all of our transit long cargo in the DC-8. Lots of work ahead.

- Every agency we visited in Thailand has endorsed us fully, one of them -the Royal Thai Geological Survey, however, cancelled their meeting with us less than 24 hours before we met. Still TBD if this cancellation means that we are good to go, no need to meet and they give their approval (we aren’t doing land surveys anyway) or that there is no need to meet because they don’t approve. The MOU with Thailand’s space agency (GISTDA) was reviewed and all the language agreed upon. Now it’s up to the lawyers of both organizations to approve it. So we won’t know about Thailand for a few more weeks. (I know, I know!)

Malaysia, we’ll find out in a couple of days.

More later.

Jhony

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://espo.nasa.gov/pipermail/all/attachments/20230920/50f704b7/attachment.htm>