Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in ESAS, NASA, Space Transportation on Jun 27th, 2009
A few years ago, I asked the question of “how many crew do you really need for a lunar program?“ The conclusion was that if you could reduce the crew requirements (at least initially), it might allow for a much more capable, affordable, and flexible architecture. And you’d eventually be back up to 4 or [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Transportation on Jun 17th, 2009
I noticed during the DIRECT presentation at today’s HSF public meeting, that they were asked why they would need an HLV if they had depots. Now, I didn’t hear the exact question, since I had a phone call come in just a few minutes earlier (ironically enough from one of my friends in the depot [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation on May 26th, 2009
I’ve been busy a lot lately (between this, this, this, and having friends in from out of town for the holiday), so I hadn’t had a chance until now to reply to Mark Whittington’s correspondence with me (found here). A majority of his reply was arguing against stuff that I had never said, or making [...]
Posted in ESAS on May 18th, 2009
A few weeks ago, when I first discussed the ESAS Appendices on this blog, I had to be somewhat vague about my concerns, since the information wasn’t out in the public, and I didn’t want to get Chris in trouble with his sources. However, since nobody has commented further on the appendices since they went [...]
Posted in ESAS, Launch Vehicles, NASA on May 1st, 2009
For those of you who can afford it, but who haven’t done so yet, I’d suggest getting a subscription to the L2 section of Chris Bergin’sNASASpaceflight.com forum. They’ve typically been well ahead of the ball on several of the major NASA CxP stories that have broken over the last few years. And a lot of [...]
Thus sayeth the esteemed Dr Griffin: Engineers do not deal with “perfect”. Your viewgraphs will always be better than my hardware. A fictional space program will always be faster, better, and cheaper than a real space program. Now…someone remind me who’s been flying their existing rocket for seven years now, and who will be amazingly [...]
Does anyone here have solid budget numbers for how much has been spent to-date on the Constellation Program? Especially Ares-I and Orion? Just curious.
Posted in ESAS, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Space Policy on Apr 11th, 2009
Several recent news items paint an interesting budgetary picture for the future of NASA’s preferred approach for spending tens of billions of dollars to send a few government employees to visit the Moon sometime supposedly starting in 2020. The three big pieces of new information (in addition to NASA not getting the large budget increases [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, NASA on Dec 31st, 2008
Here’s a quick thought on a way to use EELVs for launching Orion that I was thinking about tonight. One of the reasons why the CEV is so big that it’s hard to launch on an existing EELV is because of the amount of service module propellant. Basically, the CEV is sized to provide nearly [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, MSS, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Transportation, Technology on Nov 6th, 2008
Here’s one other interesting paper, which was presented at the SPACE 2008 conference a few months ago. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was given a copy of a few of the ULA papers before the conference, but decided to wait until after the conference to write about it. The past few months [...]