Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Administrivia, Lunar Exploration and Development, Propellant Depots, Space Transportation, Technology on Nov 3rd, 2009
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 wanted to [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NEOs on Oct 21st, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Propellant Depots, RLV Markets, Space Transportation on Jul 30th, 2009
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 worth [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, 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 civilization [...]
Posted in ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA on Jul 29th, 2009
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 [...]
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 Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Transportation on Jun 17th, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in ESAS, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Space Policy on Apr 11th, 2009
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 [...]