Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in NASA, Space Policy on Mar 29th, 2007
One of the talks given at Space Access last week, by Ken Davidian, was rather informative. Ken’s a contractor working with NASA on running the Centennial Challenges program. Now, I’m kind of biased toward the Centennial Challenges, I work for a company that fully intends to walk away from the X-Prize Cup this year with [...]
Posted in Space Policy on Mar 29th, 2007
Sorry that I haven’t had much of the will to blog lately. It’s not that I’ve been too busy, just that I needed to recuperate a bit after the last several weeks. Anyhow, I wanted to link to the much improved “Governor’s Amendment” version of Virginia’s Spaceflight Liability and Immunity Act that Jesse Londin just [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Policy on Mar 14th, 2007
Earlier this morning an interesting article by Michael Griffin was posted at NASASpaceFlight.com in the L2 section. Apparently it was meant for Aviation Week, as it appeared on their blog there tonight (NASAWatch provided the link), which also means it’s fair game now to discuss. The paper is a long one (15 pages in the [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Policy on Mar 13th, 2007
A recent comment on Space Politics got me thinking about ESAS again. I realized that I’m probably one of the most vocal ESAS critics in the blogosphere, and figured that it would therefore be worth trying to summarize a couple of my key thoughts on the matter. Ares I Technical Feasibility: I’ve actually backtracked a [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA on Mar 12th, 2007
I did some tweaking of my Lunar Much Sooner architecture. The latest numbers are available here. The original post about this architecture can be found here. I’m still basing this on existing rockets and stages (with the only modification being a partially developed “Lunar Mission Kit” for the stock Centaur stage), as with previous versions. [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles on Mar 11th, 2007
I was just looking at the SpaceX site, seeing if there was any new info about their upcoming launch, when I stumbled across this picture of a hotfire test of their Merlin-1C regeneratively cooled engine. According to a recent article somewhere, the engine has now been test fired “dozens” of times (Credit: Cory Stewart/SpaceX) : [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles on Mar 9th, 2007
It’s interesting how you can hear a part of an idea, file it away in the back of your brain, and then all of the sudden have something pop into your mind months later. A couple of months ago, my arch-nemesis from ATK (ok, he’s actually a friend of mine, we just tend to disagree [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 8th, 2007
I got home just in time to catch the liveblogging of the Atlas V STP-1 launch tonight. As several others have already pointed out, this launch was fairly important because it carried the Orbital Express satellite into orbit. Orbital Express is a DARPA project being led by Boeing, that will test out several autonomous on-orbit [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 8th, 2007
I’ve been thinking a lot about this year’s ISDC which is coming up. I’d like to go for several reasons. One, I’d like to see what ISDC is like. Each space conference seems to have its own flavor, and attracts different parts of the industry. Two, I think that it might be nice getting to [...]
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles on Mar 3rd, 2007
A commenter on my post about Soyuz launches from Kourou raised the question of whether launch prices would really drop with an increase in flight rate. This question may be due to discussions about a report prepared for NASA by a Dr Hertzfeld of GWU that was discussed on the Space Show last year. I’ve [...]