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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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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I noticed during the DIRECT presentation at today’s HSF public meeting, that they were asked why they would need an HLV if they had depots. Now, I didn’t hear the exact question, since I had a phone call come in just a few minutes earlier (ironically enough from one of my friends in the depot [...]
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Several recent news items paint an interesting budgetary picture for the future of NASA’s preferred approach for spending tens of billions of dollars to send a few government employees to visit the Moon sometime supposedly starting in 2020.
The three big pieces of new information (in addition to NASA not getting the large budget increases the [...]
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[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 [...]
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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 [...]
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As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I wanted to paint the overall picture first, and then flesh out the details as time and interest permits. For this post, I want to discuss an interesting lander concept that could work well with the mission model I discussed in Part I. [...]
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