Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Administrivia, Thesis on Jul 25th, 2007
For those who are wondering, I finally got the thesis wrapped up and submitted for publication on Monday. My final thesis committee member got back from camping, signed the thing off, and after an afternoon of running around, I had the thesis in and all the rest of the paperwork in for graduation. The paper [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, Space Development, Space Law on Jul 25th, 2007
Tankmodeler, a friend and regular here at Selenian Boondocks, mentioned something in a comment to Ken’s last post that I think deserves some mention: [T]he one absolutely key stumbling block is ownership of Lunar mineral rights. No-one is going anywhere unless they know, rock solid, that they will own what they find. If space advocates [...]
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles, Space Policy on Jul 21st, 2007
Well, it looks like Rand and Clark and Jeff are too busy blogging about the New Space conference to start synthesizing things yet, so I’ll just make some comments on the big news from yesterday. In case you don’t read Space Transport News every morning like most of the rest of us, it was announced [...]
Posted in Administrivia, Thesis on Jul 19th, 2007
It’s been a while since I posted anything, and I figured it was time to give an update. After the defense on the 3rd, I spent most of the next week pretty much rewriting my whole paper, and redoing one of the key experiments. Although it was a lot more rework than I expected, it [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 16th, 2007
by guest blogger Ken Dan Lester is back, and with a vengeance. Mr. Lester works at UT Austin and has a strong interest in IR astronomy. He really wants an instrument in free-space (SAFIR), and is convinced that there are few astronomical applications that are better served by being on the Moon than in Free [...]
Posted in Thesis on Jul 9th, 2007
Well, the long hard thesis slog continues. I’m just finished analyzing data from one of the main experiments that I had to redo as part of the thesis revision. In this experiment, I measure the magnitude of the impedance of the coupled piezoelectric/nozzle system at a whole bunch of different frequencies, and then compare that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 8th, 2007
by guest blogger Ken Next up is the Message Architecture that has been developed to guide the Office of Strategic Communications in conveying the message of NASA. The VSE lays out its fundamental goal, which is “to advance U.S. scientific, security and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.” The architecture is shown as [...]
Posted in Thesis on Jul 3rd, 2007
So, I defended my thesis today. And “passed with qualifications”, which means that they had some things they wanted me to fix before they’d sign off on it. Unfortunately, the qualifications include basically rewriting much of the thesis, and then coming back to re-defend it sometime soon. Oh, and did I mention that the absolute [...]