Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Commercial Space, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA on Jul 16th, 2009
Mr X over at ChairForce Engineer has one of the best Apollo retrospectives I’ve seen this week (which is only helped by linking to one of my other favorites from this week, by Reason’s Ron Bailey). Their points are well-taken. At some point, we’ll have evolved our space transportation system to the point where we [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, MSS, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Transportation, SpaceX on Jun 28th, 2009
Ok, two weeks ago, I mentioned that the “pre-depot” dual EELV launch concept my friend had passed to me could be adapted to do manned lunar missions. Lunar missions are a lot easier to close if you assume a depot in LEO (and even easier if there’s also a small depot at L2). But it [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Technology on Jun 27th, 2009
I recently found a fun presentation on lunar excavation technologies that I thought deserved a bit wider circulation. I’ve actually been interested in lunar excavation for over a decade now (in fact, it played a role in leading me to my thesis topic, but that’s a post for another day), and I think that this [...]
Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation on May 26th, 2009
I’ve been busy a lot lately (between this, this, this, and having friends in from out of town for the holiday), so I hadn’t had a chance until now to reply to Mark Whittington’s correspondence with me (found here). A majority of his reply was arguing against stuff that I had never said, or making [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Propellant Depots, Space Transportation on Feb 10th, 2009
[Update 2/10/09 11pm: I'm actually pretty sure I made a mistake here, and my entire idea may be more or less worthless. Basically, the problem is that for any elliptical trajectory, you have a "line of apsides", which basically is a line connecting the apogee and perigee. In order to have a good [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Space Transportation, Technology on Dec 11th, 2008
A while ago, on aRocket, several people were discussing the concept of the launch loop. Read the articles here and here to get caught up to speed on the details. The idea is a non-rocket way of launching payloads to orbit. The launch loop has a “stator” tube with an internal “rotor” comprised of ferromagnetic [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Transportation on Nov 25th, 2008
I don’t know for sure what it is, but I just don’t have a lot of mental bandwidth anymore these days. I’ve realized that I don’t have as much time or energy to pour over all the details of an idea before posting. Especially when a lot of these ideas may be a [...]
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 COTS, Commercial Space, 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 [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, Uncategorized on Sep 24th, 2008
by guest blogger Ken
Wow, so all of the chickens are coming home to roost and those who created the problem want to fob the guano off on the public at large. Anyone who has been reading my postings since the beginning of the year knows how I feel about the situation, especially since I [...]