Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Technology on Nov 29th, 2007
I’m a little more reticent these days to blog about half-baked technology ideas (for fear of being compared to our friend Gaetano), but I figured I’d toss this one out as food for thought. A couple of posts ago, I talked about the “Thrust Augmented Nozzle” concept. Now, even Aerojet will be the first to [...]
Posted in Family, Jonny Bloggin on Nov 22nd, 2007
Well, we made it safely to Utah for Thanksgiving (or Thankyou-giving-giving as Jonny calls it). We ended up driving through the night with a sick Jonny, but we made it ok. I have to say, one of the things I’m most thankful for is for such a wonderful family. And two sweet and silly little [...]
Posted in Administrivia on Nov 19th, 2007
Sorry I haven’t been able to follow up on my plans to discuss orbital transportation approaches. I was hoping to write something this morning, but I came down with a nasty stomach flu this morning. I’m holding down food again, but I’ve got quite the headache, and can’t sit up for long periods without getting [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 18th, 2007
Howdy all, guest blogger Ken here, fresh back from a weeklong business trip to China. Though I’m well experienced in Europe, this was my first time to cross the date-line and visit Zhongguo. It is a disorienting experience for a first-timer, because an automatic question is “Wait, what day is it back home?”, especially as [...]
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles, Orbital Access Methodologies, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation, Technology on Nov 13th, 2007
In order to discuss the business, finance, and policy approaches for creating low cost and reliable space transportation, it helps to have an understanding of the underlying technology, in order to provide context for those discussions. It also happens to be a lot easier for one trained primarily as an engineer (and whose business experience [...]
Posted in Politics on Nov 13th, 2007
So, apparently a few days ago on the Jay Leno show, Ron Paul made the claim that getting rid of the federal personal income tax would only cut federal revenues to the point they were at in the year 2000. The Washington Post, in nitpicking him revealed a rather depressing bit of information (my emphasis): [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Technology, Thrust Augmented Nozzles on Nov 12th, 2007
While I sometimes use this blog to talk-up some of the stuff we do at MSS, I also sometimes like to mention interesting technologies and projects being done by other groups. This post is about a potentially very interesting engine technology being pioneered by Aerojet, “Thrust Augmented Nozzles” (link to a free copy of a [...]
Posted in Jonny Bloggin on Nov 12th, 2007
Jonny was feeling sick today, so Tiff let him pick the book to read before bed. His choice? “Daddy’s Special Moon Book” as he called it… Oh, and did I mention that whenever I get on the computer he comes up to me and says “Show rocketships to me daddy! Show rocketships to me!” or [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 10th, 2007
I got introduced to the “alt.space” movement back in my freshman year via the usenet group sci.space.policy. I’ve stopped posting there (except for on a rare occasion) due to the fact that the S/N ratio is so horrendously lows, but I do poke my head in from time to time. Mostly I’ll look for posts [...]
Posted in Space Development on Nov 6th, 2007
In the spirit of trying to blog a little more, I just wanted to throw out one that I didn’t have a chance to post as a comment to a recent Transterrestrial post by Sam Dinkin. In his post Zero Divided By Zero = Space Solar Power, Sam wrote: To focus on one link in [...]