Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Rocket Design Theory, Technology on Jan 29th, 2013
In many discussions of rocket technology, a skeptic will often make some comment about how things would be so much better if we had Warp Drive. But the reality is that we don’t really need Warp Drive for things to be interesting. We just need Sufficiently Advanced Propulsion Technology™ (name derived from Clarke’s Third Law). [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 18th, 2013
There is a coding contest now for programmers to find the best algorithm for pointing the ISS solar arrays to avoid shadowing the masts during parts of the orbit which causes them to shrink from the cold and possibly buckle. Given that the station is in its’ second decade now, I would think that this [...]
Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Suborbital Science on Jan 17th, 2013
This isn’t meant to be a treatise on the topic, but an article yesterday on Citizens In Space about the benefits of Human-Tended experiments got me thinking about a chain of thought I’ve been meaning to write about for many years. I actually agree with the conclusion that in many cases human-tending of experiments is [...]
Posted in ISRU, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Settlement on Jan 15th, 2013
I don’t think this counts as my monthly blog post, mostly because I’m linking to and commenting on someone else’s blog post, but here goes. Michael Mealling (a fellow Masten Alumni gone entrepreneur) set out this year to do a blog post a day on his Rocketforge.org blog site. I really liked a post of [...]
Posted in Administrivia, Altius Space Machines, Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, COTS, Excuses for Light Blogging, ISRU, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Exploration and Development, MHD Aerobraking and TPS, Space Settlement, Space Transportation, SpaceX, Technology, Venus on Jan 1st, 2013
Last month, while in the middle of a technical writing project for work, I tweeted a list of a few blog posts I wanted to write sometime in the near future, and asked some friends to nag me occasionally until I actually write some of them. Since none of them have been nagging me recently, [...]