Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 26th, 2010
guest blogger john hare What if games can be quite entertaining even if not practical. This particular one is what if Griffen had dictated an RS-68 for the Ares? It is existing and has considerably more thrust than the J2S, which would seem to imply a more capable second stage with considerably more payload to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 22nd, 2010
I told the story of how I had gotten involved with the JSC study of an artificial-gravity/nuclear-electric propulsion (AG-NEP) Mars vehicle study. I came into the study near the end (January 2003) and right before the Columbia disaster. As near as I could tell, after Columbia happened, nobody kept working on the AG-NEP design, or [...]
Posted in Space Tethers on Jun 19th, 2010
In previous posts I’ve mentioned that when I first got to NASA I worked in the Propulsion Research Center, which was a fun place to work because you got to think about and try just about anything you wanted to so long as you could get funding, and there was this sugar-daddy at NASA named [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 18th, 2010
In several posts now, I have criticized the use of nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) engines. In the case of Earth departure stages, I have shown through mathematical analysis that they either do not have a performance improvement over chemical engines (for the overall system) or that the performance improvement is insufficient to merit the titanic [...]
Posted in Rocket Design Theory on Jun 10th, 2010
A few months ago, I spent some time describing some calculations of payload fraction that I derived to assist in the design of rocket vehicles. My motivation for getting into this type of work came about from my work on the X-33 rocket when I was an intern at the Skunk Works. I wondered how [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 6th, 2010
guest blogger john hare The increasing tempo of VTVL development flights and the recent success of the Falcon 9 lead to possibilities for a different type of cooperative venture. Two companies have VTVLs testing that are pretty much gas-n-go while SpaceX has vehicles that are quite difficult to get back. Using gas-n-go boosters to improve [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 6th, 2010
guest blogger john hare SpaceX nailed the Falcon 9 on the first try. There is enough crow being eaten around the country now that somebody should put out a cookbook. My serving comes from the expressed belief that the opening of space will come through the incremental development with RLVs starting from suborbital through small orbital [...]