Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Suborbital Science on Feb 13th, 2010
Last year, my family went out to the coast to spend the holiday with a good friend who does finance and project management work for a large aerospace company out there. We’ve been brainstorming various space business opportunities for some time to see if there were any interesting areas that we could both make [...]
Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, RLV Markets on Apr 25th, 2009
One of the most common metrics used in discussing new launch vehicles and particularly RLVs is the price in $/lb delivered to LEO. You almost can’t have a discussion about the Space Shuttle, Saturn V, SpaceX, new commercial RLVs, or almost any other launch vehicle without the discussion at some point talking about the [...]
Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, RLV Markets, Space Development, Space Transportation on Oct 9th, 2008
Now that I’ve wrapped up my Orbital Access Methodologies series, I wanted to share some thoughts about the business and market development side of reusable space transportation. Some of this may be old-hat for many of you, but I figured there are probably some who will find this useful and interesting. I was originally going [...]
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles, Orbital Access Methodologies, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation, Technology on Nov 13th, 2007
In order to discuss the business, finance, and policy approaches for creating low cost and reliable space transportation, it helps to have an understanding of the underlying technology, in order to provide context for those discussions. It also happens to be a lot easier for one trained primarily as an engineer (and whose business [...]
Posted in Business, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy, Technology on Sep 22nd, 2007
Several people have already brought up the DIRECT v2.0 architecture paper that was rolled out at AIAA Space 2007 this last week, as well as the snazzy new website that the DIRECT team just launched. I just wanted to give a few of my own thoughts.
First off, I really got a kick out [...]
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles, Space Policy on Jul 21st, 2007
Well, it looks like Rand and Clark and Jeff are too busy blogging about the New Space conference to start synthesizing things yet, so I’ll just make some comments on the big news from yesterday. In case you don’t read Space Transport News every morning like most of the rest of us, it was [...]
Posted in Business on Apr 6th, 2007
I just wanted to put a quick word for a symposium that’s going to be held in conjunction with ISDC this year that I thought some of you might be interested in. It’s called the Space Venture Finance Symposium, and it will be held on May 24th (the day before ISDC begins). Details [...]
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles on Mar 3rd, 2007
A commenter on my post about Soyuz launches from Kourou raised the question of whether launch prices would really drop with an increase in flight rate. This question may be due to discussions about a report prepared for NASA by a Dr Hertzfeld of GWU that was discussed on the Space Show last year. [...]
Posted in Business, Lunar Commerce, Space Development on Mar 1st, 2007
I typically don’t get a chance to listen in on the Space Show too often. I work long enough hours that when I get home I typically don’t have a 1.5-2hr chunk of time where I can set aside for personal time. However there was a talk this week about orbital propellant depots [...]
Posted in Business, Space Policy on Mar 1st, 2007
Here’s an interesting one I saw over on Space Law Probe: the SPACE Act of 2007. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that in spite of being rather vocal about space policy, I’m not exactly the kind of space activist who goes out and writes his congressman all the time. In fact, [...]