Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
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 [...]
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 Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, International Space Collaboration, International Space Competition, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Space Development, Space Transportation on Jan 21st, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, NEOs, Politics, Space Development, Space Policy on Dec 14th, 2009
Amid all the recent discussion of the Augustine Committee’s results, Mark Whittington asks a question that a lot of people in Congress seem to be asking: “Why not just pay for the current program since any new program is going to cost more money anyway?” To elaborate, the line of reasoning goes that if [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, NASA, SpaceX on Dec 3rd, 2009
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 the [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Space Transportation, Thrust Augmented Nozzles on Dec 2nd, 2009
I want to clean out some of the Skribit suggestions that I’ve been neglecting for a while. Some of these may end up somewhat brief, but I wanted to at least try to be responsive.
Drop Tanks to Enable SSTO?
I don’t like drop tanks. While they do definitely make the rest of the SSTO [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, International Space Collaboration, Space Development, Technology on Nov 24th, 2009
One of the more interesting modules that was originally going to be part of ISS was the Japanese-built Centrifuge Accomodations Module (CAM). The CAM was designed to provide the facilities for testing the impact of reduced and hypergravity–over a range of 1 milligee up to 2 gees of acceleration–on various biological specimens. Tests on these [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Propellant Depots, RLV Markets, Space Transportation on Jul 30th, 2009
In light of how well today went at the Augustine Committee, I felt that it would be worthwhile to post the propellant depot white paper that a group of us submitted last week. I was originally planning a much longer paper, trying to make the case that depots were technologically mature enough to be [...]
Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, International Space Competition, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Policy, Space Transportation, Technology on Jul 30th, 2009
Or at least that’s how Stephen Flemming put it on Twitter regarding Jeff Greason’s presentation at the Augustine Committee meeting today in Florida. To be fair, the rest of the subgroup also did an amazing job, especially Chris Chyba’s wrapup near the the end, where he made the case forcefully that becoming a spacefaring [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, NASA, Propellant Depots, RLV Markets on Jul 29th, 2009
Last week, right after I finished sending my propellant depot white paper in to the Augustine Committee, I got contacted by David Shiga of New Scientist with some questions for an article he was writing. The article is now available online, and while it probably doesn’t say much that is new for most readers here, [...]