Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, NASA on Dec 31st, 2008
Here’s a quick thought on a way to use EELVs for launching Orion that I was thinking about tonight. One of the reasons why the CEV is so big that it’s hard to launch on an existing EELV is because of the amount of service module propellant. Basically, the CEV is sized to provide nearly [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 28th, 2008
guest blogger john hare Work has picked up for us in the last several weeks, so I have been focusing on trying to make money instead of posting anything. Second reason for not posting is that several of the people that responded to my concept posts managed to effectively challenge the ideas in ways that [...]
Posted in Administrivia on Dec 16th, 2008
With Christmas nearing, and lots of projects on my plate (one SBIR proposal, one abstract for an AIAA paper, and trying to put together some brief thoughts for the Obama NASA transition team), I doubt I’ll have much time to write very frequently any time soon. Just wanted to give fair warning.
Posted in NASA on Dec 16th, 2008
Now that silly season is over, and sanity is returning to most denizens of the blogosphere, Rand Simberg serves up some delicious satire about our intrepid Don Miguel De Grifo. Of course, it would be funnier if it wasn’t as accurate.
Posted in Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Space Transportation, Technology on Dec 11th, 2008
A while ago, on aRocket, several people were discussing the concept of the launch loop. Read the articles here and here to get caught up to speed on the details. The idea is a non-rocket way of launching payloads to orbit. The launch loop has a “stator” tube with an internal “rotor” comprised of ferromagnetic [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Law, Space Polity on Dec 10th, 2008
I’ve written a lot about the technical and business implications of propellant depots, and I realized I ought to discuss some of my thoughts on the the public policy side of propellant depots. On one hand, I think that propellant depots could probably be fielded eventually without any specific government assistance. On many levels I [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, SpaceX on Dec 6th, 2008
I just wanted to post a couple of short thoughts about the Falcon IX Upper Stage information that came out in the article I linked to in a blog post a few days ago. Specifically this picture from Figure 9 of the Asian Space Conference Paper (with my labels added) provides some interesting hints at [...]