Selenian Boondocks

You might be a space nerd if out of curiousity you get out a tape measure to try and calculate your appartment’s volume in cubic meters, so you can get a feel for how big it is relative to a Bigelow module… PS the answer was ~140.

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As the X-Prize Cup draws near, we’ve been very busy here at Masten Space Systems. Ian, wrote our latest update earlier today. As Ian points out, we’ve been learning a bunch about our system that is actually accelerating the overall XA-1 development path, even though the delays and “learning experiences” have somewhat delayed the first [...]

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A commenter earlier brought up an interesting thought that’s been bugging me for a while. Bigelow is trying to build his 3-person Sundancer module to be light enough to launch on either a bare-bones Atlas V, or a single-stick Falcon IX (or a Soyuz for that matter). However, he’s not going to actually ramp up [...]

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Now that I’ve had a chance to put forward some back-of-the envelope analysis showing why I think Lockheed could possibly meet the $10M/ticket price range that Bigelow is trying to achieve, I want to put a few more thoughts down. One of the common refrains I’ve heard from many commenters are of the “Big Evil [...]

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Ok, last week, when I first got sent the link to the Atlas-V man-rating paper, I noticed that they mentioned using Atlas V for space tourism. I started writing this blog post Thursday morning before the big Lockheed/Bigelow announcement, but hadn’t had a chance to finish my analysis. I mentioned that I would try to [...]

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As most of you have now read (either here or here), Robert Bigelow announced at the Space 2006 conference today in San Jose that they are going to try and launch their first manned space station by late-2009/early-2010. This first module, Sundancer, will be about half the internal volume of the Nautilus (somewhere between 165-180 [...]

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Earlier this week when I posted a link to the Lockheed paper on man-rating Atlas V, I got an off-list comment from somebody to expect a major announcement from Lockheed this week. Well, we didn’t have to wait too long. According to an article on NASASpaceflight.com, Lockheed Martin and Bigelow Aerospace have entered into a [...]

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It’s always a mixed emotion when you read a magazine article about a new technology that’s now hitting the market that you had independently thought up 7 years ago. On the one hand there’s the “Hot Dang! That idea really works?!? I am so Smart, I am so Smart, S-M-R-T!” reaction, followed almost immediately by [...]

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One of the things I’ve noticed over the past year or two is that my view about the big aerospace primes has been slowly changing. I used to pick on Boeing and Lockheed and Northrup as being a bunch of screwups who couldn’t make a cost-effective space transportation system to save their lives. I still [...]

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I was poking around at some of the other articles on that Lockheed page ,that I got sent a link to, and found some more interesting stuff. Once again, big caveat about hyperbole being used, but I still think that they make some really solid points. Particularly the section at the very bottom about Cryogenic [...]

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