Selenian Boondocks

I’ve talked a lot about the concept of on-orbit propellant transfer, and how important it is to reducing the costs of interplanetary and cislunar transportation. However, I realize that there aren’t a lot of easy to find resources discussing the problem, and many readers may not know all of what’s involved in the process. While [...]

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Well, another Wednesday night rolls around, and I find myself at home babysitting again. Things have gotten rather busy at work over the last week or two, now that we’ve are pretty much done with engine test preparations, and are moving into design of our first demonstrator vehicle (XA-0.1). Between performing the engine testing, and [...]

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The company I’m with, Masten Space Systems, is now one of the sponsors for the X-Prize Cup personal spaceflight exposition. I’ll probably be there with my family, as will David Masten (the boss), and Michael Mealling (our VP of business development). We won’t be demoing anything there this year, but we will have a stand [...]

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Some people had mentioned in the past that they didn’t like having to be Blogger members in order to comment. Blogger recently added a word verification feature to the comments section, which requires commenters to read and manually type in the letters shown before their comments can be posted. So, I’m going to try out [...]

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Tiff bought us a digital camera for my birthday (and I bought her a 256MB memory card), so I figured I’d post a few pictures of our little Jonny. Because being doting parents, we really don’t take too many pictures of anything other than him:

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In the light of Virgin Galactic’s recent announcement of the possibility of doing an orbital “SpaceShip 3″ if their SpaceShip 2 is succesful enough, I ran into a rather interesting bit of information this afternoon regarding orbital tourism. I had been poking around a NASA website that had copies of the final CER reports from [...]

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Now that I have little Jon asleep (man that kid can sure be cute–now that I have a digital camera, I may just have to post some pictures soon), I have a few minutes to blog a few thoughts I’ve been having today. The first one was about a Space.com article about some of the [...]

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Well, it looks like NASA has decided to go with the ATK Full-Employment Plan instead of trying to develop a lunar architecture that might actually lead to the commercial development of space. Can’t say I’m shocked.

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Over at NASAWatch.com, Mr. Cowing tempts us with an interesting tidbit from a press conference which focused largely on the March launch date, and the Minority Opinion addendum which raises grave doubts about NASA management and its structure. Griffin: “…I think that as NASA we do a disservice to ourselves and to our stakeholders, and [...]

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In case you’re wondering why I’m posting so much today, I’m at home tonight babysitting, and little Jon is asleep, so I have a little time on my hands. There’s been a lot of recent discussion in the space corner of the blogosphere about the Innovative Programs group that NASA is creating to pursue “non-traditional” [...]

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