Selenian Boondocks

Lunar Surface RendezvousOne of the ideas I liked from the TeamVision paper (though I think it could and should be taken farther) was Lunar Surface Rendezvous. Now, this term has been used in several different ways, so I’ll define it as a mission architecture where multiple mission elements are landed separately at the same location, [...]

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I also wanted to post a quick update about that WBC as EDS idea. Ross Tierney (the guy behind the DIRECT concept) ran some simulations for me. Apparently for the specific design of the EDS, the 6-engine WBC wouldn’t quite work. Apparently the thrust on the RL-10s is too low to deal with the fact [...]

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One of the things that I keep coming back to about EELV derived lunar missions, is that while there are a lot of interesting possibilities out there, and they are likely to be a lot cheaper than the ESAS architecture, they’re still very expensive. Compared to the price points that you’d really need to get [...]

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I’d like to thank everyone who commented publically or by email to my “Readers Survey”. The support means a lot. I guess sometimes it just really helps knowing that you’re actually making a difference, even if only a modest one. So, in case I’ve left you on pins and needles, Selenian Boondocks will keep on [...]

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Hey guys, I was trying to find if anyone had specific details about what ever happened to the RL10-C engine concept. Mark Wade lists it as having entered operational service, but the one stage they listed it as being used on (the Delta III Upper stage) actually used the extendable nozzle version that is also [...]

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I’ve been rather enjoying some of the discussions going on at the NASASpaceflight.com forums lately. Unlike some of my usual haunts where I occasionally lurk (like sci.space.policy), most of the people there aren’t people that I’ve been arguing with for just over a decade. It’s always nice to see new (or old) perspectives that haven’t [...]

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I commented on this over at hobbyspace, but felt this deserved its own quick little blog post. Every now and again, people will trot out a tired argument that HLVs are proven to be much cheaper per pound than smaller vehicles. Or that expendable HLVs are much cheaper than reusable ones like Shuttle. The people [...]

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Just out of curiousity, how many of you guys actually find what I have to write useful? I’m curious, because I sometimes get a decent amount of traffic on some of my articles, and I’m sure that most people reading it probably don’t have a lot of comments. But sometimes I just can’t help but [...]

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A couple weeks back, I brought up some fundamental flaws I saw in the logic that the Exploration Systems Architecture Study group used to come up with their preferred lunar transportation architecture. In a discussion on NASASpaceFlight.com, I started realizing that even using their own methodology, a dry-launch propellant-transfer architecture might actually have a lower [...]

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A couple of days back, when I was doing some of my preliminary thinking about the TeamVision architecture, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations trying to see what kind of lunar transportation architecture could be done with off-the-shelf (or nearly off-the-shelf) hardware. One of the single biggest problems with the current NASA architecture is that almost [...]

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