Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Space Development, Space Policy on Apr 24th, 2007
[Editor's note: A good friend of mine from Santa Clara, Henry Cate, is starting up a Carnival of Space. I'm usually not a huge fan of blog carnivals, but I think this is a creative idea, and wanted to support him on this, so this is my first "Carnival" post.] Of the top ten technologies [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce on Apr 5th, 2007
For a long time, I’ve felt that translunar tourism was an interesting potential market, especially for guys like me who have the solution of propellant depots that is definitely searching for a problem. I was quite interested a few years back when David Anderman of CSI announced their whole “Lunar Express” idea of using a [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA on Apr 4th, 2007
In a lot of conversations I’ve heard over the past year or so regarding COTS and its implications, many people trying to downplay the role of COTS (and explain why Orion has to be so heavy that only the Stick can launch it safely) have tried to play up the long duration features of the [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Policy on Mar 14th, 2007
Earlier this morning an interesting article by Michael Griffin was posted at NASASpaceFlight.com in the L2 section. Apparently it was meant for Aviation Week, as it appeared on their blog there tonight (NASAWatch provided the link), which also means it’s fair game now to discuss. The paper is a long one (15 pages in the [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Policy on Mar 13th, 2007
A recent comment on Space Politics got me thinking about ESAS again. I realized that I’m probably one of the most vocal ESAS critics in the blogosphere, and figured that it would therefore be worth trying to summarize a couple of my key thoughts on the matter. Ares I Technical Feasibility: I’ve actually backtracked a [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA on Mar 12th, 2007
I did some tweaking of my Lunar Much Sooner architecture. The latest numbers are available here. The original post about this architecture can be found here. I’m still basing this on existing rockets and stages (with the only modification being a partially developed “Lunar Mission Kit” for the stock Centaur stage), as with previous versions. [...]
Posted in Business, Lunar Commerce, Space Development on Mar 1st, 2007
I typically don’t get a chance to listen in on the Space Show too often. I work long enough hours that when I get home I typically don’t have a 1.5-2hr chunk of time where I can set aside for personal time. However there was a talk this week about orbital propellant depots given by [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce on Feb 22nd, 2007
I’ll add some more commentary later, but for now a fascinating scoop by Alan Boyle.
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Development on Jan 13th, 2007
A couple of weeks back, Doug Stanley (the guy who headed up the ESAS team) was a guest at the NASASpaceFlight.com forums, hosting a Q&A thread about the propellant studies they had been doing for the LSAM. This was right after Ross Tierney came out with his DIRECT concept, and Ross asked Doug if he [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Development on Jan 10th, 2007
[Note: Digging around on archive.org for my old Prometheus Downport Project stuff, I found this oldie but goodie that I felt was worth reprinting. My views on a couple of the topics have changed a bit over the past 15% of my life since I wrote this, but I figured it was worth putting up. [...]