Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Propellant Depots, RLV Markets on Apr 29th, 2010
It’s been a rather interesting month so far, and I’ve been under a bit too much stress lately to blog much, but I wanted to put up some of the presentations from the Propellant Depot panel I was on at Space Access this year. If I had found the time sooner I would also say [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, NASA on Mar 31st, 2010
…Like it needs a hole in the head.
I was going to write a blog post on this earlier, but Jeff Greason beat me to the punch in comments over on SpacePolitics.com (emphasis mine):
Both the Phase I and Phase 2 versions can support 7.5m fairings; I’ve discussed the fairing size argument elsewhere and won’t repeat [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, MHD Aerobraking and TPS, Technology on Feb 14th, 2010
In this installment, I want to dig a lot deeper into the mechanics of how one might maximize the utility of MHD effects for orbital reentry. But first, I wanted to spend a few seconds discussing what is important for an RLV TPS system.
RLV Thermal Protection Systems
Protection from the harsh heating environment caused by [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Lunar Exploration and Development, MHD Aerobraking and TPS, Space Transportation, Technology on Feb 10th, 2010
I’ve been meaning to write for a while about a rather fascinating, but not very well known, area of research that I think might have significant implications for several areas of space transportation. The research I am referring to is focused on exploiting Magneto-hydrodynamic forces to manipulate weakly-ionized plasmas caused by hypersonic flight in [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, NASA, Space Transportation, Thrust Augmented Nozzles on Feb 8th, 2010
One of the reasons I haven’t blogged much about my reactions to the President’s NASA budget proposal is because I’ve been doing a lot of commenting over at NASASpaceflight.com. I just realized that my latest post could actually serve pretty well as a blog post too, so I’m copying it over here for discussion. One [...]
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 Launch Vehicles, Orbital Access Methodologies, Technology on Nov 18th, 2009
Ok, I’ve been toying with another orbital access methodology, but I wasn’t sure whether to file it under Random Thoughts (which tend to be my more half-baked, far-out ideas) or with the rest of the Orbital Access Methodologies series (which I’ve tried to keep a lot more professional/high-brow). This idea is actually an offshoot of [...]
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 [...]