Posted in Administrivia, Altius Space Machines, Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, COTS, Excuses for Light Blogging, ISRU, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Exploration and Development, MHD Aerobraking and TPS, Space Settlement, Space Transportation, SpaceX, Technology, Venus on Jan 1st, 2013
Last month, while in the middle of a technical writing project for work, I tweeted a list of a few blog posts I wanted to write sometime in the near future, and asked some friends to nag me occasionally until I actually write some of them. Since none of them have been nagging me recently, [...]
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While using electromagnetic effects for atmospheric reentry and thermal protection is interesting, it’s only one of several promising options that have been proposed over the years. There is another application though, where exploiting magnet-hydrodynamic effects could be a much bigger “game changer” — aerobraking and aerocapture for reusable in-space vehicles. Traditional Aerobraking and Aerocapture One [...]
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In this installment, I want to dig a lot deeper into the mechanics of how one might maximize the utility of MHD effects for orbital reentry. But first, I wanted to spend a few seconds discussing what is important for an RLV TPS system. RLV Thermal Protection Systems Protection from the harsh heating environment caused [...]
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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 rarefied [...]
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