Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Launch Vehicles, NASA on Mar 31st, 2010
…Like it needs a hole in the head. I was going to write a blog post on this earlier, but Jeff Greason beat me to the punch in comments over on SpacePolitics.com (emphasis mine): Both the Phase I and Phase 2 versions can support 7.5m fairings; I’ve discussed the fairing size argument elsewhere and won’t [...]
I just saw something this morning that amused me. Both ESAS and Falcon 9 were formally announced within about a week or two of each other (in September 2005). Four and a half years later, a fully-orbital Falcon 9 is on the pad close to being ready for its first test flight, while Ares-I has [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles on Mar 11th, 2010
While attending the Responsive Space Conference in Los Angeles, I had an opportunity along with many others to visit the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne on the evening of March 9th and I had a wonderful time. We were given a brief tour of the facility by Brian Bjelde, who began by showing us a full-scale [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 10th, 2010
guest blogger john hare I had an interesting conversation with Jon last month about the problems with air launching rocket ships. The various flavors of air launch involve some form of altitude and velocity loss as the rocket ship drops away from the mother ship before it can light it’s engines. In most cases, it [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Politics, Snark, SpaceX on Mar 2nd, 2010
I predict that regardless of the outcome of SpaceX’s inaugural Falcon 9 launch, nobody is going to change their opinion. If it’s successful, Ares-huggers will suddenly begin to understand the concept that a single successful flight doesn’t prove anything about a vehicle’s overall reliability (while most on the pro-commercial space guys will start sounding like [...]
Posted in Rocket Design Theory on Mar 1st, 2010
When I was learning how to use mass-estimating relationships (MERs) at Georgia Tech, our focus was on reusable launch vehicles, and most of our MERs came from NASA Langley, where my professor had once worked. When it came to much of the reusability aspects of the spacecraft, the MER tended to depend on the entry [...]