Ok, I’ve been toying with another orbital access methodology, but I wasn’t sure whether to file it under Random Thoughts (which tend to be my more half-baked, far-out ideas) or with the rest of the Orbital Access Methodologies series (which I’ve tried to keep a lot more professional/high-brow). This idea is actually an offshoot of [...]
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Back when I first gave the guest-lecture at the University of North Dakota that kicked off this series, I had only introduced four actual technological approaches to making RLVs work. The balance of the time I spent talking about the economics of reusable orbital transportation (and the development process for getting from here to there). [...]
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While I have the topic fresh in my mind, I decided to jump into the next part of my continuing series. Though it wasn’t a conscious choice on my part, I notice that the order I went with for this series actually follows a consistent pattern. In each part of this series, we discuss methods [...]
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Some of the comments to my last post got me thinking about what I’m trying to accomplish with this series. The reality is that each of these approaches that I’m discussing could easily fill a full chapter in a textbook, complete with 20-30 pages of text, tons of graphs, equations, sample designs, detailed discussions of [...]
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This third installation in my Orbital Access Methodologies series (parts I can be found here, and part II here) has been a long time in the coming. It has taken so long, not because I’ve been spending months researching and analyzing the topic (I knew most of what I wanted to say back in January), [...]
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Before I go into detail on any of the two stage to orbit (TSTO for the uninitiated) approaches that I mentioned in my post last week, I’d like to briefly discuss what I think is the key issue that drives the design and development tradeoffs for reusable TSTO launch vehicles. That issue is: how do [...]
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As I mentioned last month, I would like to briefly discuss in a series of blog posts some of the more promising potential approaches for reusable orbital transportation. There is often a tendency among engineers to completely dismiss any idea other than ones own preferred approach as being unrealistic, naive, flawed, impossible, inefficient, etc. However, [...]
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In order to discuss the business, finance, and policy approaches for creating low cost and reliable space transportation, it helps to have an understanding of the underlying technology, in order to provide context for those discussions. It also happens to be a lot easier for one trained primarily as an engineer (and whose business experience [...]
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