Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Propellant Depots, Technology on Nov 16th, 2011
Since I’m not yet ready to talk about some of the neat ideas we have in the hopper at Altius, I figured it might be fun to do some blog posts on some of the cool-but-not-very-well-known space technologies that are being worked on these days, particularly ones being developed by other companies here in the [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Technology on Mar 21st, 2011
I’ve been too busy to do much blogging lately, but I just saw this on twitter a bit over an hour ago: XCOR and ULA Demonstrate Revolutionary Rocket Engine Nozzle Technology, and wanted to make some comments. First off, I wanted to congratulate my friends at XCOR and ULA. This engine work that ULA and [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, NASA, Space Policy on Feb 18th, 2011
From NASAWatch/Spaceref: “While it is true that prudent investments in science and technology will almost certainly yield future economic gains and will allow our knowledge economy to grow, it is also true that these gains can be thwarted by poor decision-making,” Chairman Hall said. “Americans expect and deserve better. With our unemployment hovering at over [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, NASA, Space Development on Feb 3rd, 2011
So, according to Rob Coppinger, USA has proposed to operate the Shuttle “commercially” as part of their CCDEV proposal. For a cool, $1.5B/yr over the next six years, they’ll provide two shuttle flights per year. Personally, I think this is mostly a terrible idea. While offering fixed-price services, and moving to FAA regs is nice, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 rarefied [...]
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, Commercial Space, COTS, 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 [...]