Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Launch Vehicles on Apr 28th, 2007
One item of contention that I’ve seen in the emerging space industry is about the relevance that suborbital spaceflight has for future orbital applications. With the exception of RpK, all of the current effort going into building reusable, safe, and operable launch vehicles has been focusing on suborbital vehicles first. However, while most of those [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Space Development, Space Policy on Apr 24th, 2007
[Editor's note: A good friend of mine from Santa Clara, Henry Cate, is starting up a Carnival of Space. I'm usually not a huge fan of blog carnivals, but I think this is a creative idea, and wanted to support him on this, so this is my first "Carnival" post.] Of the top ten technologies [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 22nd, 2007
By guest blogger Ken We’re rapidly closing in on one month out from the ISDC and things continue to gel well. First and foremost, because I’ll finally get to meet Jon face-to-face. The prep work certainly has not been an easy process, and if I had to grade myself on program management I’d have to [...]
Posted in Administrivia on Apr 17th, 2007
Sorry guys, but the light blogging is going to continue for a while. I’ve got some ideas I’d like to write a bit about, but getting my thoughts together to a point where they’d be worth posting is going to take longer than I have at the moment. Here’s a random sampling of the craziness [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 12th, 2007
One of the reasons why I’ve started doing these “Random Thoughts” blog posts was in order to toss out some ideas that I just don’t have the time to research completely, yet still sound interesting. On some of my more detailed posts, I can often spend 4-6 hours writing, doing math, looking figures up, etc. [...]
Posted in Business on Apr 6th, 2007
I just wanted to put a quick word for a symposium that’s going to be held in conjunction with ISDC this year that I thought some of you might be interested in. It’s called the Space Venture Finance Symposium, and it will be held on May 24th (the day before ISDC begins). Details and registration [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles on Apr 5th, 2007
Last night I ended up staying up a lot later than intended. It’s a long story, so I’ll spare you the details (other than that it involved a cold, a cat, an upcoming open-house, a gassy baby, a LLC competitor, and the RS-68–don’t ask). While I was up, I got reading some of Ross Tierney’s [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce on Apr 5th, 2007
For a long time, I’ve felt that translunar tourism was an interesting potential market, especially for guys like me who have the solution of propellant depots that is definitely searching for a problem. I was quite interested a few years back when David Anderman of CSI announced their whole “Lunar Express” idea of using a [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA on Apr 4th, 2007
In a lot of conversations I’ve heard over the past year or so regarding COTS and its implications, many people trying to downplay the role of COTS (and explain why Orion has to be so heavy that only the Stick can launch it safely) have tried to play up the long duration features of the [...]
Posted in Family on Apr 1st, 2007
Just wanted to put some pictures up since it’s been a while: This last one is an oldie, but one of my favorites. It was a picture from when Tiff and I had just gotten engaged (which was four years ago Friday). It was sitting in my scriptures for most of the past four years, [...]