Selenian Boondocks

I was hoping to put up another article or two tonight, but I really need to get to packing. I’m flying up to Oregon tomorrow to join Tiff and Jonny, and to attend a wedding for Tiff’s brother James. I won’t be back until Tuesday, and probably won’t have any internet access during that time. [...]

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I have to admit that I’m rather impressed and surprised with the amount of response my earlier posting on that topic received. Due to some misunderstandings, I realized though that I probably need to add and clarify a bit. First and foremost, the list I came up with wasn’t supposed to be a wish-list of [...]

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It’s a very good thing that I wasn’t drinking milk when I read this a few minutes ago. After all the bedwetting going on over the last several days about what the Iranians were going to do yesterday, I couldn’t resist posting this one, in spite of my usual attempts at keeping the political commentary [...]

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Well, I go awoken at 7am this morning by a phone call from my mom. Apparently, my brother Adam, and his wife Ki had their second baby this morning, Zane Isaac Goff. I’m not sure what it is with Goff babies, they must be taking AP Life courses, because all of them have been born [...]

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Well, I really mean it this time. The last few days were a bit of an unusual circumstance–Tiff and Jonny being gone in Oregon, a bit of a lull at work, some extra excuses for going home early once or twice a week (just got called as a Webelos Den Leader, so I have to [...]

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A few years back, I remember seeing some info about some of von Braun’s old lunar lander ideas he had written about for Collier’s back in the day. One of the interesting ideas that he had proposed was using on-orbit assembled landers that would use room-temperature propellants stored in inflatable propellant tanks. I remembered thinking [...]

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1. You’re doing your laundry and find a AN cap in the washer when you take the clothes out. 2. You then think “that’s an AN929-2J…what’s that doing there?” 3. You then think “wouldn’t it be funny to write a blog entry about how ‘You Might Be a Rocket Nerd’ for finding an AN929-2J in [...]

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I’ve talked a lot on my blog about the various technologies that are important for a society to master before they can become a truly spacefaring society. I figured just for kicks, and in an effort to tone-down on the snarkiness and NASA-bashing that is oh-so-easy to get caught up in, I’d put up a [...]

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I’ve heard a lot of people recently referring to a Griffin talk at the Mars Society, where he called the COTS program a “bet” or a “gamble”. The obvious implication being that the Stick and NASA “business-as-usual” is a sure thing, and those risky, unserious, alt.space companies can’t possibly really be able to deliver stuff [...]

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There’s a certain quote, that I hear may be apocryphal by a Senator Dirksen that went something like “A billion here, a billion there, eventually it adds up to real money.” My recent post about relative costs of the Shaft compared to the EELVs and the COTS vehicles got me thinking about how much a [...]

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