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, [...]
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For those of you who aren’t reading our ASM Blog, I participated in a panel at the SSI Conference last week in San Jose. Dallas Bienhoff presented the paper we are working on coauthoring, Gary Hudson talked about earth-to-orbit transportation, and Joe Carroll talked about several other interesting technologies including: mid-air capture (which I’ve talked [...]
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The more I think about the Lunar One-Way-to-Stay concept, the more intriguing it is. Fundamentally, it’s one of the only ways with existing transportation systems to get the cost of early lunar experimentation anywhere near low-enough to be useful and interesting. Ultimately, for thriving two-way cislunar commerce, you need tugs, and depots, and high-flightrate RLVs. [...]
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I didn’t have a chance to watch either of the House subcommittee hearings today, so I’m grateful that Clark linked to the testimonies of the various witnesses. I really enjoyed reading Brett’s testimony, and thought one of his points in particular is worth repeating. To me one of the more interesting points is found at [...]
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Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, MSS, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Transportation, SpaceX on Jun 28th, 2009
Ok, two weeks ago, I mentioned that the “pre-depot” dual EELV launch concept my friend had passed to me could be adapted to do manned lunar missions. Lunar missions are a lot easier to close if you assume a depot in LEO (and even easier if there’s also a small depot at L2). But it [...]
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I recently found a fun presentation on lunar excavation technologies that I thought deserved a bit wider circulation. I’ve actually been interested in lunar excavation for over a decade now (in fact, it played a role in leading me to my thesis topic, but that’s a post for another day), and I think that this [...]
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I think most in the commercial space industry would agree that COTS is one of the best things the government has done to help promote commercial space in a long time. While I think that overall this program has been run pretty well by government standards, some recent discussions on a few threads at NASASpaceflight.com [...]
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As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I wanted to paint the overall picture first, and then flesh out the details as time and interest permits. For this post, I want to discuss an interesting lander concept that could work well with the mission model I discussed in Part I. I may [...]
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I don’t know for sure what it is, but I just don’t have a lot of mental bandwidth anymore these days. I’ve realized that I don’t have as much time or energy to pour over all the details of an idea before posting. Especially when a lot of these ideas may be a lot farther [...]
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[Note: As a bit of a preface to this repost from a usenet group, I wanted to give a bit of background. I first got interested in the whole commercial space thing when I was 16, mostly through a usenet group I had stumbled on called sci.space.policy. Unfortunately, as time went on, the group's signal [...]
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