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 [...]
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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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If you’ve read enough space blogs, forums, and usenet groups, you’ve probably heard of the one-way-to-stay Mars mission, but what most people don’t realize is that in 1961 and ‘62 such an approach was also seriously suggested and investigatedfor early lunar missions as well. While this may sound like a historical curiosity, I think [...]
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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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Ok, between the trip to DC for the awards ceremony on Thursday, and taking all of next week off for a long-needed vacation, I’m not quite out of the woods yet. But after that I want to get back into blogging. And I have a few topics I’d like to write about, but [...]
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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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Just reading some of the comments from the Constellation used-car sale pitch going on in Huntsville today. One of the topics discussed was how Ares-V enables manned missions to Mars. The Marshall guys put up a chart showing that depending on whether we go with NTRs or chemical propulsion, Ares-V could place the needed mass [...]
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