Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Administrivia, MSS on Dec 31st, 2009
Dave just wrote the latest Masten Update over on our MSS Project Blog. The update goes over some of our plans for the new year. Hopefully I’ll have something more to talk about soon.
Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, NEOs, Politics, Space Development, Space Policy on Dec 14th, 2009
Amid all the recent discussion of the Augustine Committee’s results, Mark Whittington asks a question that a lot of people in Congress seem to be asking: “Why not just pay for the current program since any new program is going to cost more money anyway?” To elaborate, the line of reasoning goes that if [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 14th, 2009
guest blogger john hare
A variant on the compound tether is the electrodynamic tether with rotovator. In this one a long electrodynamic tether has solar panels and other counterweights high enough to get the center of mass to a 135 minute orbit with the bottom end at LEO altitudes. With the bottom end at 2,500 m/s below local [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 13th, 2009
guest blogger john hare
Ramjets come up just about every time someone takes a fresh look at space launch. It seems such an obvious approach that very few of us have skipped looking into them. The trade studies that have been done repeatedly show that there is no benefit to their use in acceleration missions, which [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 12th, 2009
guest blogger john hare
This is not part of Kirk’s series on tethers. Unlike his professional tether work that just needs funding and hardware development, this is a concept that may have serious flaws that make it yet another hare brained scheme. If Kirk sees a flaw in this post, that is probably good enough to take for granted [...]
Posted in NASA on Dec 11th, 2009
Dave pointed out to me earlier today that it looks like Centennial Challenges is finally going to get more funding this year (see http://docs.house.gov/rules/omni2010/hr3288cr_divb_jes.pdf on page 182 about 3/4 of the way to the bottom). The new amount is the full $4M that the Obama Administration asked for earlier this year.
While this [...]
Posted in Space Tethers, Space Transportation, Technology on Dec 10th, 2009
So I’ve started out telling you that momentum-exchange tethers are great. Why? you might ask. Well, because a spinning momentum-exchange tether is capable of transferring a fair fraction of the orbital energy and angular momentum in its orbit to a payload in just a few minutes. That’s a pretty impressive trick. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 6th, 2009
guest blogger john hare
There is an increasing discussion of launch escape systems in the last few months. Most of them seem to focus on developing some sort of high acceleration tower to yank the capsule free in event of booster malfunction. The financial numbers involved get quite entertaining, with the added dangers of a seldom [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 5th, 2009
guest blogger john hare
I received a disturbing email today. John Bossard at http://plasmawind.typepad.com critiqued my cagejet idea at my request. I have been down for various reasons for the past month or so and mentioned that the criticism had disturbed me until a few unrelated issues resolved. He apologised for torpedoing my idea. That’s disturbing, bad ideas [...]
Posted in Space Tethers, Space Transportation, Technology on Dec 3rd, 2009
Anyone who’s interested in going to the Moon ought to take a serious look at the technology of momentum-exchange tethers. My own interest began back in 1998, when as a summer intern on the X-33 program at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, I spent time after work trying to come up with a new lunar [...]