Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 29th, 2008
by guest blogger Ken. Howdy all! I hope everyone is hard at work in the new year, bringing space ever closer to Earth. Keep up the good work at Politico! The last couple of weeks have certainly been eventful. Not just in the financial markets, where I’m getting a front row view of the action, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 26th, 2008
While I am glad that it’s looking less and less likely that he’ll ever sit behind the desk in the Oval Office, I do have to commend Mr Giuliani for specifically bringing up COTS and commercial space transportation today in his op-ed article on FloridaToday.com: We will maintain America’s technological advantage in space. We will [...]
Posted in ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Politics, Space Development, Space Law, Space Policy on Jan 25th, 2008
I’ve had several people in several places ask me if I was going to do a point-by-point rebuttal of Mike Griffin’s comments to the STA this week (for reference the text of his comments is available here). While I don’t have the time to go into every single disagreement I have with what he said, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 23rd, 2008
For those of you who have been following my Orbital Access Methodologies series, you’ll remember that I talked about the potential of using White Knight Two as the carrier plane for a small “assisted SSTO”, or a “TSTO with glideforward first stage landing” (to coin a phrase for the good idea John Hare mentioned in [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Orbital Access Methodologies, Space Transportation, Technology on Jan 19th, 2008
Before I go into detail on any of the two stage to orbit (TSTO for the uninitiated) approaches that I mentioned in my post last week, I’d like to briefly discuss what I think is the key issue that drives the design and development tradeoffs for reusable TSTO launch vehicles. That issue is: how do [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NA, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy on Jan 19th, 2008
The story broke yesterday that a group of scientists, astronauts, and other space enthusiasts is going to be meeting at Stanford next month to discuss an alternative to the Vision for Space Exploration. Clark and several others have already commented, but I figured I ought to throw in my two cents. Basically, I’m skeptical. While [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Technology on Jan 12th, 2008
Ok, before I go into this latest blog post, I want to put a disclaimer up front: This idea is crazy. I’m not posting this because I think it’s the greatest idea since sliced bread. I don’t think that this the one and true way to get to space. Don’t try this at home. I [...]
Posted in Administrivia on Jan 7th, 2008
I’m glad to see that my first “orbital access methodologies” post has received as much attention as it has already. As I mentioned in my original post last month, I intend to talk about a few other promising approaches that I discussed for that guest lecture at UND in November. The rest of these approaches [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Orbital Access Methodologies, Space Transportation, Technology on Jan 4th, 2008
As I mentioned last month, I would like to briefly discuss in a series of blog posts some of the more promising potential approaches for reusable orbital transportation. There is often a tendency among engineers to completely dismiss any idea other than ones own preferred approach as being unrealistic, naive, flawed, impossible, inefficient, etc. However, [...]
Posted in NASA on Jan 3rd, 2008
I know that Clark and Keith have already mentioned this, but I have to congratulate NASA for finally obeying the law and purchasing commercial services from ZeroG instead of just running their own in-house NASA proprietary Vomit Comet. Whoever pushed this through deserves congratulations. Peter D. and ZeroG also deserve kudos for not giving up [...]