I had to keep this under wraps until this morning, but it’s now formal:
May 25th, 2010, Mojave, CA, USA: XCOR Aerospace and Masten Space Systems, two of the leaders in the New Space sector, have announced a strategic business and technology relationship to pursue jointly the anticipated NASA sponsored unmanned lander projects. These automated lander [...]
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Over on the Space Business Blog, my good friend Colin Doughan has had a few posts discussing the concept of lunar land grants. While I haven’t had the time to read all of the comments, I do have to admit to having a few issues with the concept proposed:
The land grant size proposed is [...]
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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 [...]
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While using electromagnetic effects for atmospheric reentry and thermal protection is interesting, it’s only one of several promising options that have been proposed over the years. There is another application though, where exploiting magnet-hydrodynamic effects could be a much bigger “game changer” — aerobraking and aerocapture for reusable in-space vehicles.
Traditional Aerobraking and Aerocapture
One of the [...]
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I’ve had a few more ideas on the Lunar One-Way-To-Stay concept that I figured it would be worth posting now before I forget them. I still think this is pretty much the only way that there will be a human foot on the Moon this decade. More importantly, this is the only cost-effective way short [...]
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The more I think about the Lunar One-Way-to-Stay concept, the more intriguing it is. Fundamentally, it’s one of the only ways with existing transportation systems to get the cost of early lunar experimentation anywhere near low-enough to be useful and interesting. Ultimately, for thriving two-way cislunar commerce, you need tugs, and depots, and [...]
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Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, NEOs, Politics, Space Development, Space Policy on Dec 14th, 2009
Amid all the recent discussion of the Augustine Committee’s results, Mark Whittington asks a question that a lot of people in Congress seem to be asking: “Why not just pay for the current program since any new program is going to cost more money anyway?” To elaborate, the line of reasoning goes that if [...]
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This is kind of embarrasing to admit, but I had a long-time misconception about the delta-V requirements for reaching NEOs. A long time ago, I read some figure for delta-V requirements for earth-crossing asteroids. The figure was ridiculously low, something like 60m/s. At the time I read it, I didn’t really have a lot of [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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