Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Technology on May 13th, 2009
One of the topics I like to blog about is promising new space technologies, especially those that relate to reusable launch vehicles and space transportation infrastructure. Clark Lindsey recently linked to the website for the Space Propulsion Group, where a friend and former intern (Jonny Dyer) now works. They mostly do hybrid propulsion systems, but [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, RLV Markets on Apr 25th, 2009
One of the most common metrics used in discussing new launch vehicles and particularly RLVs is the price in $/lb delivered to LEO. You almost can’t have a discussion about the Space Shuttle, Saturn V, SpaceX, new commercial RLVs, or almost any other launch vehicle without the discussion at some point talking about the $/lb [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, RLV Markets, Space Transportation, SpaceX, Technology on Apr 22nd, 2009
[Editor's Note: It's been too long since I wrote the first article in this series, and I wanted to write some more on this topic. My tendency to try to cram everything into one ginormous ominbus post has been almost completely preventing me from publishing anything original about space lately, so I'm going to try [...]
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, Launch Vehicles, SpaceX on Dec 6th, 2008
I just wanted to post a couple of short thoughts about the Falcon IX Upper Stage information that came out in the article I linked to in a blog post a few days ago. Specifically this picture from Figure 9 of the Asian Space Conference Paper (with my labels added) provides some interesting hints at [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, Launch Vehicles, SpaceX on Nov 29th, 2008
I just saw two interesting SpaceX documents linked to on NASASpaceflight.com. The first is a paper that was presented at the Fourth Asian Space Conference back in October, and the second is a presentation from the von Braun Symposium, also back in October They’re both fairly interesting, and provide some extra insight into the direction [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, International Space Collaboration, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation on Nov 20th, 2008
Space Journalist/Blogger Rob Coppinger wrote an article tonight attempting to debunk “The Fantasy of Propellant Depots“, which he makes out to be some sort of religious mantra in the New Space community. I will admit that depots are finally starting to get a tiny bit of the attention they deserve, but that has only been [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, RLV Markets, Space Development, Space Transportation on Oct 9th, 2008
Now that I’ve wrapped up my Orbital Access Methodologies series, I wanted to share some thoughts about the business and market development side of reusable space transportation. Some of this may be old-hat for many of you, but I figured there are probably some who will find this useful and interesting. I was originally going [...]