Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in ESAS, Launch Vehicles, NASA on Aug 29th, 2008
I wasn’t planning on doing any more blogging today, but I had a serious “what the hud!” moment earlier today, and thought it worth bringing attention to it. This is a presentation that was given by NASA back on July 2nd, and linked to by “anonymous.space” over in a comments section in Space Politics. Anonymous.space [...]
I know it’s been a while since I’ve blogged last, but here’s a gem from our favorite friend from Planet Strawman. This morning he asked whether Obama’s statement that he wants to revitalize NASA represents a flip-flop from his previous position of postponing Constellation. I had emailed him (after clarifying that I had no intention [...]
Posted in ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Development, Space Transportation on Jul 16th, 2008
I don’t have time to go into detail at the moment, but I wanted to relay an interesting paper that Keith Cowing reported on NASAWatch today. Now, if I were someone at the ESA, I’d probably be taking NASA’s grand plans about Constellation with an appropriate sized grain of salt right about now. But there [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, ESAS, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy on Mar 8th, 2008
There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few days about OSTP Director John Marburger’s speech at the recent Goddard Memorial Symposium, but there were a couple of good points that I felt deserved repetition, and I also had a few thoughts I would like to add. One of the memes that John started [...]
Posted in ESAS, Launch Vehicles, NASA on Feb 8th, 2008
…it’s how you place the blame. Or at least that’s how a friend of mine at NASA once put it. Apparently, in the wake of yet more news leaks about severe technical issues on Ares I, Mike Griffin decides to play the blame game (hat tip: Space Politics): A: Let me get down to the [...]
Posted in ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Politics, Space Development, Space Law, Space Policy on Jan 25th, 2008
I’ve had several people in several places ask me if I was going to do a point-by-point rebuttal of Mike Griffin’s comments to the STA this week (for reference the text of his comments is available here). While I don’t have the time to go into every single disagreement I have with what he said, [...]
Posted in ESAS, Launch Vehicles, NASA, Space Development on Oct 9th, 2007
One of the common mistakes I’ve noticed in the engineering is to overoptimize a subcomponent of a system at the expense of the system as a whole. I saw this a lot back in my manufacturing engineering days. You’d get someone working on a specific machine or process, who doesn’t have a good grasp of [...]