Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Launch Vehicles on Jan 31st, 2007
Sundancer Orbital Trajectory Implications (Part One) In the first post in this series, I hinted at the idea that there may be a serendipitous benefit to Bigelow’s choice of orbital inclination for Sundancer. I had received a refined version of the groundtrack trace, and it was subtly different from the first one, so I was [...]
Posted in Administrivia, Launch Vehicles on Jan 29th, 2007
There’s going to be a bit of a delay before I post part two of my series about Bigelow’s chosen trajectory. I got an email from one of my sources at LM with a higher resolution version of their ground track trace, but it appeared to be different from the one shown in the Lockheed [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles on Jan 27th, 2007
Back in September of last year, Bigelow announced an ambitious plan, that if successful may become one of the key events in the commercial development of space. On the heels of his Genesis I mission, that performed far better than expected for a first orbital mission, Bigelow announced that they were intending to accelerate their [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 23rd, 2007
by guest blogger Ken Eagle-eyed Keith Cowing over at NASAWatch has spotted a European press release for sponsorship of an ESA student at the NASA Academy. This is great news for the excellent NASA Academy program. With so many programs at risk right now, this is one of those great programs that tends to irk [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 22nd, 2007
by guest blogger Ken. With great fanfare I’m proud to announce the ISDC 2007 Call for Papers for the May conference. While Jon works on his thesis, I’m going to try to distract him with thoughts of perhaps submitting a presentation on cislunar infrastructure architectures for the ‘Moon & Cislunar Space Development’ track at the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 22nd, 2007
Jonny loves cars, trucks, and trains… Jonny also loves his blocks… Jonny loves cars and trains with his blocks… And, just in case you might have thought that there was any hope for this boy… What does James think of all this?
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 21st, 2007
Things have been rather hectic as of late, so I haven’t had much chance to blog lately. Part of that was due to my monitor dying (possibly hastened along its way by Jonny), part of it the fact that I’m getting back into spending most of my “free” time on my thesis. And partially because [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 16th, 2007
Dave has another brief update on what we did today, along with some more video:This was basically a preparatory run for our throttle response test. While we’ve done hundreds of firings now with the engine in the trailer, this test was our fifth on the vehicle. We wanted to run a few runs to try [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, MSS on Jan 16th, 2007
Who says little boys are the only ones allowed to play around in the dirt? Seriously though, we actually had a valid scientific reason for doing a test without the jet deflector in place. Honest. We uhh…needed to know if a jet deflector was really necessary for testing, and if it was actually doing any [...]
Posted in Administrivia on Jan 16th, 2007
Just added Matthew Bowes’ new blog Space Liberates Us! to the blog roll. It looks promising. Of course I’m biased because he commented positively on my MSS Update blogpost.